A regional public health department in Idaho is no longer providing COVID-19 vaccines to residents in six counties after a narrow decision by its board.
Southwest District Health appears to be the first in the nation to be restricted from giving COVID-19 vaccines. Vaccinations are an essential function of a public health department.
While policymakers in Texas banned health departments from promoting COVID vaccinesopens in a new tab or window and Florida’s surgeon generalopens in a new tab or window bucked medical consensus to recommend against the vaccine, governmental bodies across the country haven’t blocked the vaccinesopens in a new tab or window outright.
Setting aside the anti-health and anti-sanity aspects of this, the thing that gets me is that Republicans somehow continue to believe that they’re the party of freedom when everything they do involves ever more regulation.
They frame things as if the Democrats are oppressing people and the Republicans are fighting for their freedom, but the exact opposite is actually true - the way that things actually work, consistently, is that Democrats want to give people the freedom to do things and Republicans are fighting to destroy those freedoms. Their reaction to every single thing they encounter is to pass a law against it, which is literally the exact opposite of freedom.
Now granted - most of their positions are insane, so it’s not as if rationality should be expected, but this just seems to be something so simple and so obvious that they can’t possibly miss it. Yet somehow they do.
