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Pulitzer Prize-winning author and director of NYU Langone’s Division of Medical Humanities David Oshinsky penned an informative and interesting cover piece for the Wall Street Journal’s weekly Review section this weekend. It takes a mostly evenhanded look at America’s history with communicable diseases and vaccinations, which were sometimes made compulsory. But a close read suggests that Mr. Oshinsky may lean left with those supporting state mandates over individuals’ personal choices. The the original draft of the email to Mr. Oshinsky below was also copied to Review editor Adam Horvath and ACLU president Deborah Archer.
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Dear Mr. Oshinsky,
Your informative cover article for WSJ’s Review section this weekend stayed largely clear of the kind of Leviathan State bias, prevalent elsewhere in our media, that helps drive some of the anti-vaxxers’ fever these days [“The Long History of Vaccine Mandates in America,” C1, Sep. 18].
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But to refer as you do in Paragraph 26 to “anti-vaccine anxieties…especially among Republicans” ignores the fact that blacks, Democrats’ most reliable voting bloc, by far comprise the least vaccinated and thus, presumably, most anxious subset of the U.S. population (see Minaj v. Reid).
And earlier, at the end of paragraph 3, you note that “Even the ACLU took a pass” (my emphasis) on defending Philadelphia’s religious holdouts who resisted measles vaccines for their children. As though the ACLU hadn’t long ago devolved into just another operational arm of America’s increasingly radical left, known for its wholly situational standards and ethics.
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Granted, the Philadelphia story you note occurred in 1991, when the ACLU still had some institutional connections to its truly noble and evenhanded past, including its 1978 defense of marching neo-Nazis in Skokie. But that ACLU has long since ceased to exist. And any contemporary references to the organization, particularly in light of the general ignorance of younger readers by way of wholesale campus indoctrinations during the past 30 years, should offer at least a short sentence’s worth of context.
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For the record, I’m fully vaccinated and presume you are too. But you subtly seem to wish that others, voluntarily or otherwise, would join us in relative safety. I, on the other hand, don’t really care what others choose in the face of Covid and its variants. Mind you, if we were talking about Mike Crichton’s Andromeda_Strain or another communicable bug that meant almost certain death, I might lean more toward coercion.
But Delta variant or otherwise, Covid poses minimal risk to healthy people, and the fear-mongering and desire to turn society upside down because of it are preposterous. In fact, since the virus is working to thin our already unaffordable Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security rolls, at least at the margins, we should be discreetly pleased since our elected lawmakers seem to have no intention of ever again dealing realistically with our nation’s mounting and eventually bankrupting debt.
Darren McKinney, Washington, D.C.