When do you have to be pressured to get a vaccination and when do you have to be exempt? In California, it relies on how a lot political clout you may have.
The California Lawyer Normal’s Workplace introduced Tuesday that it’ll attraction a federal choose’s September order that might require all state jail staffers to be vaccinated towards COVID-19. The discover of attraction comes after Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom declared final month that Democratic officers ought to “lean in” to COVID-19 prevention efforts, citing their “ethical authority” to avoid wasting folks’s lives.
And it comes after Newsom’s workplace introduced on October 1 that California would grow to be the primary state within the nation to mandate COVID-19 vaccinations for college kids, pending full Meals and Drug Administration approval of the vaccines.
The ability dynamics at play right here are usually not delicate or exhausting to divine. California is insisting that college youngsters get vaccinated, whereas concurrently combating to guard jail guards from a vaccine mandate, as a result of college students, who’re at very low danger of significant COVID-19 problems in comparison with older age brackets, haven’t got a public sector union with deep pockets. The California Correctional Peace Officers Affiliation (CCPOA), the state’s highly effective jail guard union, donated $1.75 million to Newsom’s recall protection.
In the meantime, prisons have been the epicenter of many main COVID-19 clusters. In U.S. District Choose Jon S. Tigar’s September order requiring that every one 66,000 state workers coming into California prisons be vaccinated or have a spiritual or medical exemption, Tigar famous that from August to mid-September, 48 outbreaks have been traced again to jail employees.
As I wrote final yr through the early phases of the pandemic, prisons are petri dishes for illness. At one level final April, eight out of 10 of the largest COVID-19 hotspots within the U.S. had been prisons and jails. Illnesses do not stay inside jail partitions, although. Employees take them again into their communities. Jail inmates, in the meantime, particularly older women and men with persistent well being situations, are trapped in establishments which have little to no concern for his or her well-being. (Tigar’s order got here partly as a result of the California jail system’s medical providers have been below receivership since 2006 attributable to its repeated failures to supply sufficient well being care to incarcerated folks.)
Tigar’s order was opposed by the California Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the CCPOA, and Newsom’s workplace.
This isn’t “following the science” or leaning in. It is simply bare machine politics, one other instance of hypocritical “guidelines for thee, not for me” coverage making that unfold like, nicely, an epidemic through the previous yr and a half.
Recall when Newsom was caught eating unmasked at The French Laundry, a three-Michelin-star restaurant, with a CEO and a lobbyist, simply days after advising Californians to follow social distancing and keep away from non-public social gatherings, together with Thanksgiving.
Tigar’s order has been quickly blocked by a Kern County choose, who was appointed by Newsom. That injunction, nevertheless, solely applies to CCPOA members and never different jail staffers.
It should be good being a part of the political class that is not topic to the feckless whims of Newsom’s “ethical authority.”