By SUZANNE DOWNING
Anchorage Mayor Austin Quinn-Davidson advised the public on April 12 that it’s time to have “hard conversations” with your friends and neighbors to push them to get a Covid-19 vaccine. Any one of the vaccines.
She said the vaccine is safe and the best vaccine is the “one that is available to you.”
If you are among the “vaccine hesitant,” you might want to avoid your neighbor until this panic fever dies down. Hard conversations could be behind the next knock on your door.
Less than 24 hours after the Anchorage mayor made her pronouncement, the CDC and FDA told health officials across the country to hit the pause button on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, because issues have arisen with some people developing blood clots several days after receiving that vaccine.
The six who got the blood clots were women between the ages of 18-48 who had had the shot a few days prior. One woman died and a second was hospitalized in critical condition. With nearly seven million having taken the Johnson & Johnson single-dose Covid-19 vaccine, that’s a small number, to be sure, but we also don’t know if there are undiagnosed blood clots that resolved themselves without medical care. There is a lot we still don’t know about the new vaccines we’re accepting.
The AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine is also now linked to a rare, but sometimes fatal blood-clotting reaction. Many countries in Europe have pulled that vaccine back from distribution, to be used only for older adults. Some countries are not using it at all after younger people developed headaches, swelling, and stomach pain.
All medications have some element of risk associated with them; even a regular dose of aspirin, that ubiquitous fever-reducing miracle drug, has been linked to Reyes Syndrome in children and teens.
Quinn-Davidson, who is not a medical professional and not even an elected mayor, is now dispensing unproven medical advice about the efficacy and safety of all Covid-19 vaccines. She is not following the science.
File Quinn-Davidson’s admonition that the new vaccines are safe under the category of “claims, without evidence.” That’s the media standard set by The Washington Post and New York Times these days.
Quinn-Davidson has set a goal of having 70 percent of Anchorage residents vaccinated before her emergency orders in Anchorage, which have kept the city’s economy in a tailspin, will be lifted.
The community is halfway there, with about 35 percent of adults now vaccinated. Getting to 70 percent is evidently going to take some coercion.
In her rush to get everyone vaccinated, she is engaging in public policy malpractice in ignoring the fact that the vaccines are experimental, approved for emergency use only. We who have accepted the “jab” are part of a grand experiment (this writer included.)
Importantly, it’s the dangerous governmental policy to have an unelected mayor encourage her constituents to bully their friends and neighbors with “hard conversations” into getting a vaccine that some have qualms about. To proceed to tell Alaskans that they must take the vaccine for the sake of the economy is practicing public policy without a constitutional foundation.
