President Joe Biden revealed his authoritarian side this week when he announced a slew of COVID-19 measures ostensibly designed to curb the spread of the virus and its Delta variant. He stated his administration would be issuing an executive order with a variety of measures, including a rule that would require all businesses with 100 employees or more to require every employee to take the jab.
The announcement was met with a vigorous backlash from Republicans, some of whom have already indicated they would be taking legal action to stop the implementation of the executive order. Many have rightly pointed out the authoritarianism inherent in Biden’s proposal. But some signals might suggest that we haven’t seen anything yet.
The flu season is coming up, and indications suggest that it could be particularly perilous this year.
NBC News reported that two studies noted that the upcoming flu season could be “a miserable one.” Xiaoyan Song, chief infection control officer at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., told the news outlet that “there are some factors that we cannot control as far as how bad the flu season is going to be.”
She recommended that people should get vaccinated against the flu.
The report explains that “since flu was minimal to nonexistent last year, people were not exposed to the virus, potentially undermining the protection they’d normally have.”
Dr. Mark Roberts, director of the Public Health Dynamics Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, told reporters:
“Much of the immunity that we have as a population occurs because people in the population had influenza last year, and if they get a similar strain circulating, they won’t get influenza the second year.”
His team calculated that this flu season could cause up to 600,000 hospitalizations.
William Schaffner, professor of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, also painted a bleak picture of the flu season. He told the Wall Street Journal that “the worst case scenario is a real twindemic” of flu and COVID-19 infections.
WSJ also pointed out:
Many children will be back in school where they can pick up and spread infections, the health experts said. Many adults aren’t working in their offices where they typically get flu shots, or they don’t want another vaccination after getting their Covid-19 doses. And many people will no longer be protected by masking and other Covid-19 restrictions that have been eased.
Another issue is the possibility that the flu shot could be less accurate than in previous years because less of it was circulating last year, which means researchers have fewer data to select the correct strains for this season’s injection to target.
I’ll put it simply. If a “twindemic” occurs, we can expect more draconian measures imposed by the Biden administration. But it won’t stop there. Democratic officials at the state and local levels and in Congress will be aggressively pushing for more mandates. They may even call for a return of lockdown orders, especially in blue states like California and New York.
While any federal action will surely be challenged in the courts, it does not mean that Democratic governors and city officials won’t be able to succeed in flexing their power once again. While they will not be able to go as far as Australia — no matter how much these folks wish they could — they will almost certainly use a “twindemic” as an opportunity to enact more authoritarian measures.
Before the Delta variant emerged, America was heading back to something resembling normalcy, much to the chagrin of the hard left, which was clinging as tightly as they could to COVID-19 measures. But now, the flu season might give them the excuse they need to pull the nation back to March 2020 – or as close as they can get. If things go a certain way, it is highly possible that we are not even close to being out of the woods yet — unless you live in a red state.
