Who needs California when we have West Virginia?

Imagine seeing untold numbers of people die from the COVID vaccines. Picture hospitals refusing people organ transplants unless patients get the shot. Envision thousands of armed services members drummed out of the military for refusing the jab. And knowing all of that, then conclude that the state should make it even more difficult for people to be exempted from vaccine mandates.

Say what?

That sounds like something you would hear from a California Democrat, right? Turns out, it’s a proposal from none other than the Republican state Senate majority leader of West Virginia. The state’s motto might be “Mountaineers are always free,” but if they don’t change the type of Republicans they elect this year, mountaineers will always be controlled.

After expanding their majorities in 2022, Republicans now control the West Virginia state Senate, 31-3, and the House, 87-11. There aren’t even enough Democrats to work on all of the standing committees. Yet not only has GOP leadership blocked any meaningful attempt to reform the state’s emergency powers and vaccine and mask mandates that Governor Jim Justice wielded at the height of the pandemic, Republicans now want to expand state vaccine mandates.

Which brings us to Senate Bill 412 by Senate Majority Leader Tom Takubo. Knowing how hard it is to find a doctor willing to buck the system, Takubo’s bill would require a physician submitting certification for medical exemption to be licensed in West Virginia. It would also require the doctor to submit his full rationale for the exemption to the “state immunization officer” — a position that should never exist in a free state.

If that weren’t enough, the bill includes penalties on physicians for “unethical conduct” if five or more of their exemptions are overturned.

In short, Takubo’s bill would ensure that no doctor with a brain will offer a medical exemption for a vaccine mandate that shouldn’t exist in the first place. At a time when we are discovering more and more problems with the vaccine industry and the CDC, SB 412 would dictate that the decisions of the “state immunization officer” must be “based upon current guidelines by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.”

We now know that the CDC drafted a letter in May 2021 — before any of the mandates — warning about myocarditis, but officials strategically chose not to publish it. They went on to offer full licensure to Pfizer’s shot several months later and then mandated the shots without ever divulging the dangers. West Virginia’s Republican leaders want our lives and liberties to be tethered to this dirty agency’s whims.

Ranking above the state immunization officer is the state health officer. Takubo’s bill mandates that the health officer review “a random sample” of the immunization officer’s medical exemption approvals. Upon review, if a “significant number of the approved exemptions were found to be incongruent with the medical evidence,” then the immunization officer faces either re-training or “the possibility of progressive discipline up to and including removal.”

Who needs California when we have West Virginia?

Although Takubo’s bill appears unlikely to pass, the fact that the Senate majority leader proposed it at all suggests West Virginia Republicans have no plans to loosen pandemic-related rules and restrictions. It’s hard to imagine the legislature banning vaccine and mask mandates or preventing future governors from imposing lockdowns as Jim Justice did for nearly two years.

West Virginia has a governor who masked schoolchildren and criticized Joe Biden for not pushing the vaccines hard enough, even though Justice got sick with COVID despite (or perhaps because of) his three doses. Justice wanted Biden to extend the emergency even longer! Now Justice is running for Senate with Trump’s endorsement against Alex Mooney, a Republican congressman from the northern part of the state.

It’s a lamentable fact that no lockdown Republican governor has been punished for his tyranny. Governors, including Jim Justice, Mike DeWine in Ohio, Kay Ivey in Alabama, and Greg Abbott in Texas, were all easily re-elected. All had the support of Donald Trump.

In the GOP-controlled legislatures, almost every floor leader and health care committee chairman is a bought-and-paid-for creature of the biomedical security state. It’s also clear that if Trump remains the GOP leader at the national level, there will be no reckoning in Congress either. To this day, the select House oversight subcommittee on the coronavirus has not held a hearing on vaccine injuries.

Our only path forward is to elect new legislators in red states who pledge to oppose all vaccine mandates. This is why my friend Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, an ear-nose-throat specialist in Houston, has established the Americans for Health Freedom PAC to support candidates who are fighting the dangerous vaccine. She has circulated a pledge to fight the vaccines, which has already been signed by 87 candidates and 73 elected officials and Florida Surgeon General Joe Ladapo. Candidates can sign the pledge here.

On August 1, 1776, just a few weeks after signing the Declaration of Independence, Sam Adams spoke before a large audience at the State House in Philadelphia, beseeching them to fight for their independence. During the speech, he warned the public that “our contest is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth for civil and religious liberty.”