Governor Maura Healey is your typical, trainwreck of a proglodyte. On one hand, she declares a state of emergency over the number of illegals the Biden Administration dumped on her. On the other hand, she refuses to allow anyone to work with Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (CBP/ICE) to round up the murderers, child rapists, drug and gang members, or human traffickers here illegally, which facilitated the state of emergency.
It is all very partisan and political, having nothing at all to do with what is best for public safety or the people of Massachusetts. And while she suggests this recent move isn’t political, that seems unlikely.
State Sovereignty
I can’t complain about any embrace of State’s rights where the Federal Government has no purview. Immigration enforcement is a Federal responsibility when Democrats are in charge, but vaccine schedules are another matter, and Healy has announced that Massachusetts intends to go its own way.
Good for them!
According to the governor, going forward, the state’s Public Health Commissioner will decide which vaccinations are approved for use in the Bay State, “and not the CDC.” The change is necessary, she said, because Secretary Kennedy is abandoning science in favor of “taking people down this crazy, zany rabbit-hole of conspiracy.”
“I’m not about playing politics. This is about public health. This is about our responsibility as states — and those of us privileged to serve — to make sure that we’re doing right by people,” she said.
This is precisely as it should be. Most of what the CDC does would be better off in the private sector with a skeleton crew of non-captured experts and bureaucrats offering information or direction to resources about matters of public health interest. States could consider it, but otherwise do their own thing, like Florida. It will no longer mandate any vaccine, leaving the matter up to parents and their doctors.
Telling CDC to f-off is just alright with me, especially if it means it can help RFKJ dismantle it further thanks to the leadership of Governors like Ron DeSantis and (in this rare instance) Maura Healey. Does Maura realize that by reclaiming her state’s right, she is undermining her party and its obsession with bloated, ineffective bureaucracy? A Senate Committee just grilled the Health Secretary over his house cleaning at the CDC. An agency that has overseen not just the COVID disaster but also aided and abetted the decline of public health in both children and adults. A record Democrat Senators tasked with oversight defended when they attacked Kennedy’s effort to fix what’s broken.
Article VI.
States are responsible for protecting the rights of their people (from abuses by the federal government and themselves), which raises another issue if Maura’s sovereign state’s rights stand is to have any meaning beyond politics. The word public appears one hundred times in the Massachusetts State Constitution. Nowhere could I find the words, wellness, medicine, or vaccine. Nowhere is the word “interest” coupled with anything related to the person or their well-being. It does include this. Article IV.
No man, nor corporation, or association of men, have any other title to obtain advantages, or particular and exclusive privileges, distinct from those of the community, than what arises from the consideration of services rendered to the public; and this title being in nature neither hereditary, nor transmissible to children, or descendants, or relations by blood, the idea of a man born a magistrate, lawgiver, or judge, is absurd and unnatural.
Massachusetts also requires vaccinations to attend public school. It allowed universities to require them to attend higher ed facilities. It mandates experimental emergency use pharmaceuticals for a wide range of instances and occupations during the pandemic, powers that the Massachusetts State Constitution does not grant, even though the word emergency appears seventeen times in the text.
The words health and safety appear a handful of times, but not in any medical context related to what we currently call public health, and certainly not in the case of a vaccine schedule for children.
Healey is right to take the matter into the state’s hands, and Massachusetts might be better for it if the people rise up to make changes in their own representation that they could not effect in distant DC.
But this is Massachusetts. Not all that long after some colonists dressed up and tossed some tea into the harbor, politicians dressed as saviors of the people and threw their rights overboard as well.
