Back in March, Governor Ricketts issued a statement opposing “vaccine passports.” He said “This concept violates two central tenets of the American system: freedom of movement and healthcare privacy.” I couldn’t agree more. Whether or not someone has taken any medication is absolutely none of the government’s business. Government policies that force people to be injected with drugs they don’t want, is flat wrong.

I’m not an “anti-vaxer.” The Army has given me scores of vaccines over three decades. Vaccines are a blessing of modern medicine we should all be thankful for. Countless millions of people around the world are alive today because of them. What I am opposed to is government tyranny. The COVID vaccine (which I have taken after I recovered from COVID) is not for everybody. Many health professionals argue that the risk of vaccine side effects may be greater for some people, than being infected by the virus. 

If you’re a person whose health situation makes you vulnerable to a bad outcome from the virus (like me) I hope you talk to your doctor and seriously consider getting vaccinated. On the other hand, forcing the vaccine on healthy children and young adults who have a virtually zero chance of a bad outcome from the virus is unprecedented. These decisions should be left up to parents and individual citizens.

The CDC’s data show that 99.97 percent of otherwise healthy people under fifty will survive the virus. Requiring the vaccine for people who have been inoculated naturally concerns me. Studies estimate as much as 50 percent of the US population is naturally immune from having survived the virus. In spite of this, government officials insist people with natural immunity be vaccinated anyway. Ignoring natural immunity has never been a public health policy in the USA until now. This kind of decision is not based on medical science whatsoever and raises serious questions about this decision-making.

The federal government’s confusing behavior towards the vaccines is not fostering trust and confidence in our public health institutions. There is no good reason to have a one-size-fits-all policy requiring everyone to get the vaccine. We’ve never fired people from their jobs for refusing a medication. This approach has never been used before in the US. I firmly believe the State of Nebraska should ignore federal mandates that are not addressed in Nebraska law. 

I think Nebraskans should be provided the best information and recommendations our fantastic medical community in Nebraska can provide, but the decision to take a medication or give one to your children should be 100 percent left up to parents and individual citizens to decide without fear of penalty.

In the United States (and virtually nowhere else on Earth) individual citizens are sovereign and have autonomy over their own body because they have rights given to them by God. The federal government’s very first responsibility is to protect and guarantee those individual rights. I think the COVID virus has caused some folks to forget this.