A COVID-19 Outbreak in Florida Presents the Best Evidence Yet Against Vaccine Passports and Mandates – Opinion

If you’ve taken stock of the COVID-19 numbers coming out of New York City, they aren’t good. This heavily Democratic city is actually seeing its most severe coronavirus-related cases in years.

Now, the logical response to that is to ask how that’s possible. New York City is among the most heavily vaccinated in the United States. It has a vaccination mandate, a vaccine passport, strict universal mask requirements, and a vaccine mandate. Why aren’t all those draconian mitigation measures resulting in a linear reduction in the spread of COVID-19?

But it’s not just blue areas where vaccine passports and strict testing regimes are failing. Florida’s latest outbreak may be the strongest evidence that mitigation strategies are ineffective in stopping the spread of the virus. A cruise ship in which nearly everyone was vaccinated, and those that weren’t tested negative prior to boarding, has seen a coronavirus outbreak.

According to the Miami Herald.

Carnival Cruise Line has confirmed that the coronavirus infected a group of crew and passengers aboard the Carnival Freedom cruise, which left Miami on Saturday to the south Caribbean. The ship was refused entry into Bonaire and Aruba.

It’s the third COVID-19 outbreak in less than a week affecting cruise ships operated by Carnival and Royal Caribbean that have departed Miami and Fort Lauderdale ports.

As the most prevalent strain of coronavirus, the Omicron, spreads in Florida, and nationally among people who are fully vaccinated, the infections continue.

And while we don’t know how many were actually infected on the Carnival Freedom, we do know that the Symphony of the Seas docked several days ago with 48 positive cases, despite 95 percent of the ship being fully vaccinated. 98% of those with positive tests were fully vaccinated. In other words, there’s no possible way to blame that outbreak on the “unvaccinated.”

Forty-eight positive tests out of thousands of people on board may not sound a lot, but when you do the math as a seven-day rolling average, something common in judging COVID infection rates, that’s actually around the same positivity rate as New York City (800 per 100,000 vs. 1050 per 100,000), which again is seeing record high case numbers.

This is what it means to me that vaccination passport systems are absurd. We’ve known for a long time that everyone spreads COVID-19, and now Omicron is even more transmissible. You are not doing anything of any value by segregating unvaccinated from vaccinated.

This vaccine passport scheme is merely to shame and punish. It is not necessary to prevent someone from enjoying a meal at a restaurant, or even going to a ballgame because they haven’t been vaccinated. Unvaccinated people are no greater risk to spread the coronavirus statistically than those who have been vaccinated.

Besides, isn’t the entire point of getting fully vaccinated that it supposedly works? If it does work, then what is the point of having vaccinated people interact with them? None of this makes any logical sense, and again, that’s the point. It’s about getting people to follow the political will of leftists, and not protecting anybody.