You can rarely be sure that judicial incompetence will kill people, but Federal District Judge Terry Doughty crossed that line when he issued an injunction blocking the Biden administration’s requirement that nursing home personnel be vaccinated for COVID-19. (The injunction, which the administration is appealing, has since been modified by a higher court to apply only in the 14 states that sued.) This week, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch produced something worse than incompetence.
A recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that nursing home patients are far more likely to die of COVID if there are many unvaccinated staff. Among residents in low-vaccination facilities, death rates were nearly three times those of facilities with the highest levels of staff vaccination. The study concluded that, during the two-month period studied, “if all the nursing homes in our sample had been in the highest quartile of staff vaccination coverage (82.7% on average), 4775 cases among residents (29% of the total during the study window), 7501 cases among staff (29% of the total), and 703 Covid-19-related deaths among residents (48% of the total) could possibly have been prevented.”
The New York Times reports that some nursing homes were moving slowly on getting their staff vaccinated, waiting for the federal mandate (perhaps because they could then tell staff not to blame management for the requirement).
Judge Doughty, a Trump appointee, relied heavily on the written declaration of Dr. Peter McCullough, who was fired from the Baylor University Medical Center for spreading misinformation about COVID. Baylor has since obtained a temporary restraining order against McCullough, citing “the likelihood of irreparable business and reputational harm” if he kept lying that he was still affiliated with the hospital. He has promoted the debunked, dangerous malarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the disease. McCullough has falsely claimed that 50,000 people have died from the vaccine. There is a section of his Wikipedia page entitled “COVID-19 misinformation.” He is, in short, a crank. I was able to learn all this in a two-minute Google search.
Doughty uncritically cites numerous false claims by McCullough: that “the COVID-19 vaccines do not prevent transmission of the disease among the vaccinated or mixed vaccinated/unvaccinated populations; that mandatory COVID-19 vaccines for hospitals do not increase safety for employees or hospital patients”; “that because of the progressive mutation of the spike protein, the virus has achieved an immune escape from COVID-19 vaccines”; and that “the Delta variant is not adequately covered by the vaccines.” There is so much wrong here that it is hard to know where to begin.
Then Judge Doughty offered his own medical expertise: “If boosters are needed six months after being ‘fully vaccinated,’ then how good are the COVID-19 vaccines, and why is it necessary to mandate them?” This is a surprisingly common misconception, based on a misunderstanding of basic probability.
Video: Covid vaccine developer warns next pandemic could be worse (NBC News)
It is true that, as Doughty says, “even if you are fully vaccinated, you still may become infected with the COVID-19 virus.” The vaccines are not 100 percent effective. But the disease has killed 1 of every 100 older Americans. Danger is statistical, and unvaccinated people are 20 times more likely to die of COVID.
Late in Doughty’s opinion, we find out that all the scientific poppycock is a rationalization for what really bothers him: “maintaining the liberty of individuals who do not want to take the COVID-19 vaccine.” It is an odd conception of liberty that entails the right to kill people. If that is right, then we owe drunk drivers an apology for infringing on their liberty. But it’s not clear that Doughty believes that. “Requiring COVID-19 vaccinations to healthcare workers covered by the mandate,” he wrote, “would hurt the patients the Social Security Act [the source of the federal funding] was meant to help.” He thinks vaccines don’t work, and that he is promoting health by preventing the loss of workers and funding (a problem the Biden administration was going to address by imposing the mandate in stages).
The idea that liberty means a right to hurt people has, however, been squarely embraced by some members of the Supreme Court.
Lets start with – I didn’t click and read it all. But why are so many people that are protected by this “safe and effective” vaccine driven to force others to follow suit. When I see that the Cleveland Browns had so many players test positive, and they were vaccinated, something suggests to me that misinformation abounds. Give them(the NFL) credit, when results of testing didn’t match there hopeful outcome, that the unvaxed are getting and spreading, they quickly decided to not test vaccinated players unless sickness was obvious. Yes and VD gets spread because it isn’t always obvious.
I would rather have an unvaxxed nurse than no one there to help in my emergency!