Less than four years ago, the unvaccinated were the enemy, killing their fellow citizens, and their rights, their jobs, their families, their homes, their entire lives didn’t matter. There was no compassion to be found. No sympathy. No helping hand. In many cases, not even unemployment when they were forced from their jobs for no reason.
In an ideal world, compassion would be a universal phenomena, not tied to one’s politics or choice of profession. In principle, fair minded people should feel sympathy for the government workers who have lost their jobs as a result of President Donald Trump’s efforts to streamline the federal government and reduce the deficit. Many of us have been there ourselves and know all too well how it feels, the sense of failure, hopelessness, and desperation that comes with losing your livelihood. Personally, I was summarily laid off after eighteen years of service to the first company I worked for almost straight out of college. I had been married less than a month at that point and working for a relatively small company, everyone knew it, but still, I went into work one day, was called into a meeting in the afternoon, found human resources waiting for me without any warning, and then promptly escorted from the building without even the chance to say goodbye to my coworkers, some of whom I had known for more than a decade. Instead, they told me to say nothing, do not speak to anyone, and they’d ship my few office effects to me afterwards. The layoff wasn’t due to my performance or commitment, both of which were never in doubt. As is frequently the case in these unfortunate matters, the company wanted to cut costs in the department I headed and decided to go in a different direction, folding my position into another. They did this even though I had told the leadership several times that I was more than willing to help them restructure, and after spending almost twenty years there, simply wanted to make a graceful exit, protecting my team and my customers, but they didn’t care, and I’m not so sure I blame them given the old expression about ripping the band aid off. Whatever the case, I was a newlywed without a job and had to find my way forward, as millions of others have. A little more than eight years later, I would very much like to extend my sympathy to government workers, many of whom are going through this right now, some without the resources I had to not be worried about simply putting food on the table, but despite the better angels of my nature, I can’t bring myself to do so. The reason is simple: There was a pandemic between then and now, during which the very same people demanding compassion today ruthlessly and gleefully demanded the firing of those they disagreed with over a vaccine of questionable efficacy, indeed one whose efficacy and associated risks were both lied about repeatedly.
Back then, as in less than four short years ago, the great majority of Democrats and their progressive enablers including the mainstream media had no compassion whatsoever for individuals like Karl Bhonak. As NPR described his plight in 2021, “For 33 years, Karl Bohnak worked at his dream job delivering weather forecasts on TV for what he considers one of the most challenging but beautiful spots in the United States — Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He became so popular that ‘That’s what Karl says!’ became a slogan at his station in the 1990s and even inspired a song. But Bohnak’s time as chief meteorologist for news station TV6 came to an abrupt end last month. He was fired after refusing to comply with the vaccine mandate imposed by his station’s corporate owner, Gray Television.” “I just did not want to take the shot,” he explained. “I felt it was my right as a human being and a citizen of the U.S. to decide what I put in my body,” he said into a progressive world where no one cared and no one would listen. While the total number of people affected by these mass firings remains unclear, the media apparently unwilling to crunch these particularly devastating numbers, thousands if not hundreds of thousands across the country were affected. In Washington State alone, NPR reported that even as early as mid 2021, “nearly 1,900 state workers, including the head football coach at Washington State University, have quit or been fired for refusing the vaccine. In Michigan, 400 workers at the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit walked away from their jobs. North Carolina-based Novant Health fired about 175 employees. And the list goes on,” they claimed, while failing to mention that these health system employees especially were lauded as heroes only a year earlier, only to see their own fellow citizens turn on them so suddenly and viciously. NPR went on to detail what had happened in even conservative Texas, a state President Joe Biden described as subject to “Neanderthal thinking” earlier that same year. At Houston Methodist hospital and health system, 150 people lost their jobs including Jennifer Bridges, a registered nurse and therefore presumed hero, and Becky Melcer, a scheduler, who coordinated diagnostic procedures and surgeries. Ms. Melcer was six years from retirement, summarily fired two weeks shy of fifteen years with the organization. Adding the proverbial insult to injury, she was also denied unemployment, “told she was ineligible because she’d been fired for misconduct for not following company policy.” “If I wasn’t married, I don’t know what I would be doing,” she said at the time. Nor was it easy for her to find another job in healthcare, because almost every organization required the vaccine, shutting her out of employment options in her career of choice. As a result, she was forced to consider customer service, where she would take a pay cut, or starting an entirely new career in real estate.
All told, ABC News reported that vaccine mandates were the “10th highest reason for job cuts in 2021.” “Roughly 5,000 people that lost their jobs in the last month [October] due to COVID vaccine refusal [which] made up actually 22% of the total number of people that we tracked being let go across the country,” claimed Andy Challenger, Senior VP of Challenger, Grey & Christmas, Inc. a Chicago-based outplacement business and executive coaching firm. “Challenger said since vaccines became widely available to adults in June, more than 6,800 workers have been cut or left their jobs because of vaccine mandates. He anticipates numbers will grow, following the new federal deadline for two-thirds of the country’s workforce announced on Thursday.” ABC News went on to cite those who bizarrely described people losing their jobs as an unequivocally good thing, showcasing San Francisco as being ahead of the curve for forcing people to comply with these mandates. Peter Lerloe-Munoz represented the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, a consortium of more than 350 companies in the Bay Area who have “consistently supported” vaccine mandates. “I think that is a credit really, to the kind of forward-thinking of our region,” he shared with ABC. “And it’s served us well” “It allows for things like greater working in-person collaboration, it allows for visiting different work sites, R&D sites as well,” he added. San Francisco-based Fast, a one-click check out company, concurred that firing people for non-compliance was the best way forward, good for everyone, except perhaps those who were fired as a result of their schemes. “We’ve already said to our employees, ‘If you want to come into the office, if you want to travel for work, if you want to meet clients, you have to be vaccinated,” explained Jason Alderman. To these companies, you see, it was just a question of following the science at the expense of their fellow workers and they were happy to be blazing a trail that left shattered lives in their wake. “It almost feels like the rest of the country is catching up now, to what the Bay Area has been doing since the start of the pandemic,” he explained. “Welcome. We’re glad you’re here,” he said showing no sympathy at all nor did anyone at ABC bother to question his cold indifference.
It gets worse. As the self proclaimed party of science, academics were dutifully recruited to inform us in official tones how awesome these mandates truly were and why we didn’t need to worry about messy little things like families who lose their homes. In that regard, the so-called Journal of Medical Ethics published a research paper on “The ethics of firing unvaccinated employees,” not surprisingly reaching the conclusion that it was completely and totally ethical to do so. As the abstract phrased the apparent ethical dilemma between requirements in place before employment, and changing requirements against the will of employees who would be fired as a result, “Unlike prospective employees who will not be hired if they do not meet vaccination conditions, existing employees who fail to meet new vaccination conditions risk being fired. The latter seems worse than the former. Hence, objections to vaccination mandates commonly centre on the harms that will be visited on existing employees who are unwilling to be vaccinated.” The author, Maxwell J. Smith, proceeded to explain why any and all arguments against vaccine mandates were “unpersuasive” despite these rather politely phrased harms considering people’s futures were potentially as stake. “In this paper, I shall argue that if one has reason to believe vaccination requirements can be justified for prospective employees, one should also believe they are justified for existing employees despite any asymmetry in consequences experienced by the two groups. As a consequence, common objections made against vaccination mandates grounded solely in the harms that may be experienced by existing employees who are unwilling to be vaccinated should be considered unpersuasive.” Even as late as 2024, Elsevier continued to argue that vaccine mandates for healthcare workers in particular were effective, not caring whether or not anyone was fired, much less lauded as heroes right up until they refused to comply. They published, “Are COVID-19 vaccination mandates for healthcare workers effective? A systematic review of the impact of mandates on increasing vaccination, alleviating staff shortages and decreasing staff illness.” Beyond the weasel phrase “staff shortages” to cover the reality that people lost their careers and livelihoods, the same lack of compassion carried through to their results, where being fired was merely a “penalty” and their only concern was whether or not any system, not a life or a family, was “disrupted.” “COVID-19 vaccine mandates for HCWs were broadly successful in increasing vaccine uptake in most settings. Although the penalties imposed on unvaccinated HCWs did not lead to major disruption of health services, less well-resourced areas may have been more impacted. Furthermore, there is insufficient literature on the impact of the vaccine mandate on reducing SARS-CoV-2 infection among HCWs.” (Not how cleverly they dismiss that the mandates failed to work as promised; they found insufficient evidence that there was any impact on the actual infection rate, meaning these workers were fired for nothing.)
More broadly, these firings should be seen as part of a general trend to make life “extremely difficult” for the unvaccinated to quote CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, something they did intentionally to anyone who questioned their draconian, unprecedented, freedom-grabbing, anti-democratic plans. President Biden infamously promised a “winter of severe illness and death” for those who refused to comply, “For unvaccinated, we are looking at a winter of severe illness and death – if you’re unvaccinated – for themselves, their families, and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm.” Mr. Zakaria’s colleague, Stephen Collinson repeatedly framed the debate as red states destroying blue ones, Republicans versus Democrats, openly killing them with their backwards, anti-science beliefs. As he opined in the summer of 2021, “A new political war over masks is already deepening the national divides that slowed vaccinations and thwarted what once seemed an imminent victory over the coronavirus pandemic.” After former President Trump issued a statement saying, “Don’t surrender to COVID. Don’t go back,” Mr. Collinson warned, “If Trump’s faithful followers accept his advice on ignoring mask guidance again, more of them will likely get sick and die.” He wasn’t alone, either. The Washington Post insisted, “Republicans unleashed a deadly vaccine skepticism,” proclaiming it the “new political geography of sickness and death.” NBC News said “Conservative hostility to Biden vaccine push surges with Covid cases on the rise.” US News and World Report likewise claimed it’s “A Deadly Political Divide.” The message couldn’t be more clear: The unvaccinated were the enemy, killing their fellow citizens, and their rights, their jobs, their families, their homes, their entire lives didn’t matter. There was no compassion to be found. No sympathy. No helping hand. In many cases, not even unemployment. On the contrary, they deserved to be fired, all this was being done for their own good, if only they weren’t too blind to see it. The establishment and the expert class was fully righteous in doing so, ethics, science, and life itself demanded it, so get out of their way, but back in the present, we can make basically the same argument now. The country is drowning in debt, approaching $40 trillion dollars, and the Congressional Budget Office expects deficits greater than a trillion dollars for the foreseeable future unless substantial policy changes are made. As Forbes recently noted, “The main concern is that the federal budget deficit has swelled. It exceeded 6% of GDP in 2024, roughly twice the average since the 1980s, even though the economy is operating at full employment. Moreover, the prognosis of the Congressional Budget Office is that future deficits are likely to stay abnormally high absent any policy changes.”
President Donald Trump was elected in part to change this dynamic, to reduce the size of government and hence the debt and deficit, something he proclaimed many, many times on the campaign trail. From that perspective, these firings are as necessary, if not more necessary, than any claimed during the pandemic. The future itself depends on it because debt is an existential threat, consuming more and more of the budget, driving up prices, weakening the dollar, and squeezing out funding for other programs, if not collapsing the global economy. Of course, the Democrats, the media, and the experts don’t see it that way this time around, will not even acknowledge the argument. Instead, we’re all supposed to grieve with each and every horror story they share, even when they aren’t truthful about it as 60 Minutes recently depicted a former speechwriter for Democrat officials as some kind of non-partisan government employee who lost a job saving lives around the world. I hate to say it, but I can no longer bring myself to care. They did this. They will have to live with the consequences, and my only real regret is the President isn’t firing even more of them.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 