SLO County needs to rethink vaccine mandate, retract the order

October 3, 2023

OPINION by ERIC GREENING

I did not yet know of SLO County Health Officer Dr. Penny Borenstein’s shocking order to our health care workers when I commented on our state legislative platform at the Sept. 26 Board of Supervisors meeting, but now that we do know of it, the message is as needed here as it is in Sacramento.

The message

Three and a half planks need to be added to our county’s State Legislative Platform:

1. Outlaw gut and amend. That’s how SB 846 was rammed through the legislature under pressure from the governor with no committee hearings and unread by most of the people who voted on it. An example of its dire consequences is the recent waiver extension for Diablo’s once-through-cooling, in which the State Water Resources Control Board abandoned its responsibility to investigate the impacts of such a decision, strong-armed by a Legislature that also did no investigation.

2. An even wider breach of representative government has been the normalization of emergency powers. Their legitimate purpose is to allow swift response to unforeseen events when resources must be mobilized faster than orderly public process would accommodate. Any other use is abuse.

A democratic republic is lost if habitually ruled by decree. Legislation is needed to require findings of unforeseeability to justify any declaration of emergency, and emergency powers must sunset in 30 days unless extended by the Legislature, with repeat extensions capped at six months absent a vote of the people.

Rule by decree can magnify error unchecked as exemplified by the COVID response, for which Newsom now acts abashed, but it was his responsibility to notice the studies already emerging to show the ineffectiveness and harm of his orders. The 15-month stay at home order, the huge upward transfer of wealth, the elders forced to die isolated from loved ones and the torture this imposed on those loved ones, the developmental delays imposed on children, the arbitrary decrees as to who was essential and who was non-essential, the destruction of family businesses as their customers were crowded in with the hordes jamming the corporate big boxes…most egregious of all, the mandates and coercion around the dangerous medical experiment purported to be the vaccines.

Visit the website REACT-19 to link to 3500 studies showing all sorts of harm from these formulations, much of it dire. Which brings me to:

3. We need to incorporate the Nuremberg Code on medical experimentation, complete and verbatim, into California’s Health and Safety Code so that it has the force of law, to prevent such a travesty from happening again.

And the 3 1/2? A federal matter, but the California Legislature needs to pass a resolution imploring Congress to repeal Section 704 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, so that state and local governments can protect our health from intensifying electromagnetic smog. Relevant studies on these dangers and impacts are referenced in my comments on the SLOCOG Regional Transportation Plan.

I stand by that message, but now we know that there is an urgent need to add the Nuremberg Code to our county codes as well. Our health care workers are being coerced to participate in the medical experiment of the latest, recently released, barely tested COVID vaccines.

Even given the option of masking, the order violates this code which calls for potential subjects of any experiment to be able to exercise… the free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior forms of constraint or coercion.

Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” delivered new substances into arms after eight months of testing, inducing the public to be guinea pigs for Phase Three testing. Biden has outdone Trump, with barely a month elapsing between his announcement of moves to prepare a new substance “everyone” should take and its arrival at pharmacies and clinics. This would seem to sweep the public into all phases of product testing.

And let us not forget that some of these health care workers might be pregnant. What consent can those they are carrying give to participation in this experiment?

Let us hope that our county health officer rethinks the consequences of her order, and retracts it. Failing that, let us hope that health care workers, some of whom are unionized, effectively band together to resist it!

If those on whom we depend to guard everyone’s health are denied the opportunity to make informed decisions affecting their own health, then our “health care system” is seriously weakened, at the same time as all of us, sick and healthy, suffer from the the oppressive sense that everyone’s autonomy is contracting due to the further normalization of rule by decree.

Eric Greening, a long-time resident of the North County, has served as a government watchdog for decades.