by Dennis Behreandt, The New American:

It is becoming increasingly obvious that the COVID-19 pandemic is being used as a propaganda ploy to empower government to seize control of the most elemental life choices of the American people.

First, the lockdowns let governors, mostly Democrats and RINOs, determine who was “essential” and who wasn’t, and gave them the opportunity to force the latter to stay in their homes and close their businesses, among other tyrannies large and small.

Next came the madness of masking mandates that force people to wear masks whenever they need to conduct business. Neither lockdowns nor masks do anything to stop the spread of a virus, but they do psychologically condition Americans to be controlled and subjected to heightened tyranny over nothing less than the most fundamental activity necessary for life itself: breathing.

It seems clear that these two examples of deranged despotism were only to set precedents that would allow our “leaders” to impose mandatory vaccinations with whatever half-baked and dangerous concoction the FDA is so eager to approve.

Virginia has now become the first state to openly begin preparations to force the needle, at the point of gun, into the bodies of what used to be free American citizens.

Speaking to the ABC news affiliate channel in Richmond, Dr. Norman Oliver, the state’s health commissioner, promised he would mandate the jab.

“Dr. Oliver says that, as long as he is still the Health Commissioner, he intends to mandate the coronavirus vaccine,” Richmond’s 8News reported.

Commenting on his coercive plan, the megalomaniacal “doctor” said: “It is killing people now, we don’t have a treatment for it and if we develop a vaccine that can prevent it from spreading in the community we will save hundreds and hundreds of lives,” Oliver said.

Of course, much of what Oliver says isn’t completely true. There are treatments for COVID-19, not the least the inexpensive hydroxychloroquine based treatment. There are others besides. As for COVID killing people — it’s mostly not doing that either. In Virginia, so far 2,443 COVID deaths are listed on the state’s dashboard. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are 8,535,519 residents of Virginia. This means that 0.028 percent of the population of Virginia has died of COVID-19. That’s considerably less than one percent. And, of course, those numbers may be inflated. As Dr. Deborah Birx admitted in April: “The intent is … if someone dies with COVID-19 we are counting that.”

Compared to COVID, other health problems are far more dangerous to Virginians. According to the CDC, in 2017 cancer, the leading cause of death in the state, claimed 15,064 lives. Heart disease caused 14,861 deaths that year. Other causes of death:

Accidents: 3,922

Stroke: 3,555

Chronic Lower Respiratory Disease: 3,363

Alzheimer’s Disease: 2,549

Diabetes: 1,967

Kidney Disease: 1,618

Drug Overdose: 1,507

Septicemia: 1,249

Flu and pneumonia: 1,245

COVID is less deadly than many other causes of mortality in Virginia, and about the same as some others. Yet there are no full-blown statist overreactions to these other conditions. French fries and cheeseburgers have not been banned (yet). Moreover, one wonders how big the increase in death and suffering from these other conditions might be as a result of patients suffering these other diseases foregoing doctors’ visits over COVID fear, or outright being restricted from accessing healthcare during the lockdowns?

Regardless of whether mandatory vaccinations can be justified on some abstract public-health basis, where the needle meets the skin it becomes a matter of fundamental personal freedom. No person may make a claim to another person’s body or life. Doing so is the very definition of tyranny, and it was foundational to such monstrosities as Mengele’s “experiments” and the Holocaust — not to mention all the other state-run socialist/communist genocides of the last 150 years or so. This pernicious philosophy has rivaled war as a direct cause of bloodshed (though this is not to give a pass to war, as that is usually a statist project also).

Speaking of Mengele, read this short summary of the public health “work” done by this devil’s spawn and weep.

Perhaps we’re not quite to Mengele yet with mandatory vaccination. But we are standing on the philosophical precipice looking down at a very slippery slope.

Meanwhile, the very idea that the vaccine must be mandated tells you all you need to know about the expected desirability, safety, and effectiveness of the coming vaccines. In the face of disease, a safe and effective vaccine would hardly even need to be advertised. It would be, indeed, a “better mousetrap,” and the world would beat on big pharma’s doors to get access — much like the world beats today on the doors of the world’s papermakers in an attempt to purchase paper towels.

A purely voluntary vaccination program does not destroy freedom and, if based on a vaccine of proven safety and usefulness, would lead to rapid and widespread adoption — and would be much more effective than a mandatory campaign that amounts to a war on the citizenry.

Of course, bleats the chorus of pathetic quisling sheeple now overrunning the nation, Virginia’s Norman Oliver and his public health colleagues and their largely Democrat enablers just have our best interests at heart. They know best and we pitiful, dimwitted Americans should just let them run our lives. It’s for the best, after all.

On this point, Americans should turn to C.S. Lewis.

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