From the Tom Woods Letter:
Take a moment to appreciate the gravity of our situation.
For two solid years the world has been turned upside-down by an elite bent on the suppression of alternative points of view. What we laughingly call the “mitigation measures” they imposed on us haven’t done a bit of good, and instead have caused death and impoverishment everywhere they’ve been tried.
With only a handful of exceptions, every major institution has been an enemy of sanity.
You and I have been up against every channel of fashionable opinion.
That we’ve managed, under these impossible conditions, to win any victories at all is a miracle. But they keep on coming.
The most recent: in England, the National Health Service (NHS) mandate for health-care and home-care workers is being scrapped.
There are a couple of reasons that this is especially welcome and happy news.
First, it was only a week ago that the Daily Mail was running this headline: “‘No plans’ to scrap Covid vaccine mandate for frontline medics in England, Downing Street says as it doubles down on plan despite warnings NHS could lose 80,000 workers overnight.”
So we went from “no plans” to “the mandate is scrapped” in a week.
Why did they do it?
Some are trying to say it’s because of the relative mildness of the Omicron variant, and that under these conditions a vaccine mandate is no longer a proportionate response.
Maybe. But I doubt it.
Here’s a more plausible answer.
The Daily Mail reports that what prompted the revision were “fears it could force the NHS to sack around 80,000 staff who remain unvaccinated.”
According to Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers: “There were always two risks to manage here: the risk of Covid cross-infection in healthcare settings and the consequences of losing staff if significant numbers choose not to be vaccinated.”
Stop and think about what this means.
Noncompliance forced them to abandon the mandate.
And not even majority noncompliance. We’re talking in the neighborhood of 10 to 20 percent.
I know there’s plenty of hideousness still out there. I hear that.
But when we get a win, let’s be happy, and keep on pushing forward.
