The Supreme Court struck down the Biden mandate that all businesses with 100 employees or more require vaccination or testing. Healthcare workers can still be required to vaccinate, but it’s not going to be enough.

At the same time, we have a truly frightening surge of Omicron right now. The numbers are bad.

As a footnote, Glenn Beck has Covid for the second time. He never got vaccinated, and he’s apparently taking de-wormer.

Vaccines shouldn’t be a political issue. Vaccines save lives. They’re proven to be effective at keeping people healthy. We’ve had them for a very long. They don’t cause autism. They aren’t a way for the government to track you. It’s just good science applied to keep people alive and healthy.

I’m not entirely surprised by the Supreme Court’s decision, but I am disappointed. I had some hope. There was a vaccine case that went to the Supreme Court in 1905 in which the court upheld that a state could enforce vaccines, for the purpose of protecting the common good.

When it’s not political, we don’t have a problem complying with rules and laws that are there to protect people. People aren’t citing a religious preference to driving on the left side of the road instead of the right. People aren’t using conspiracy theories or debunked science to keep restaurant workers from wearing hairnets or washing their hands. Seatbelts laws are enforced. You will get in trouble if you are caught shitting in public outside a restroom. You’re not allowed to just hit someone, even if they make you angry.

You know. Laws. We have lots of them that infringe on an individual’s ability to do whatever they want, so that the people as a collective are protected.

If vaccines and masks and this whole stupid virus wasn’t the subject of political grandstanding, this wouldn’t be a question. We’d look at the numbers, squeak a collective “YIKES,” then do whatever we could to protect our friends and family. Barring that, we’d do whatever we could to protect our precious economy.

Make no mistake, having everyone get sick for a while, repeatedly, is a bad financial decision. It causes delays and shortages, and scarcity makes the prices go up, and… oh look! The exact problem we’ve all been facing since shortly after the pandemic began!

The Supreme Court blocked the federal government from trying to stop the spread of the virus, but individual states could still enact their own mandates. They should, but most won’t. So people will still travel across state lines, unvaccinated, unmasked, and the virus will continue to spread.

Omicron is bad. What will the next variant be like? And the one after that? With the way Omicron is exploding right now, we should probably expect multiple variants taking hold in the coming weeks and months.

I want to tie this in to writing, somehow, but the only thing that comes to mind is that this is what is occupying my mind instead of fiction. This is the kind of thing that distracts me from work. I’m not in any direct danger, but this is my home, and whether I like them or not, these are my people. How can I look away when I see us headed for a cliff?