Missouri AG Eric Schmitt bobs his head as Tucker Carlson spouts dangerous nonsense
What we have learned from our last couple of Missouri attorneys general is that the only point of the job is to appear on Fox News as often as possible. And by this measure, Eric Schmitt is a big success.
On Friday, he was back on Tucker Carlson’s show. But what he said on the show was less memorable than the sight of him nodding along as Carlson said this: “The boosters aren’t working. There’s evidence that people who get the boosters are more likely to get the latest variant” of COVID-19.
This is not just false, but is the opposite of the truth. In fact, according to a study by researchers at the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT and Harvard, an additional “booster” dose of Moderna or Pfizer mRNA-based vaccine is essential, providing far greater immunity against the omicron variant.
That was the time for Schmitt to say, “Wait, what?” instead of going along.
But then, Schmitt questions nothing that he thinks might help him get elected.
He told Carlson that “the pathway to tyranny is paved with these kind of emergency executive orders” from President Joe Biden. The kind that requires health care workers in facilities that get federal money to be vaccinated against the virus.
Those orders are really just the pathway to fewer people in nursing homes getting sick.
And vaccine requirements are not exactly new: In 1776, George Washington ordered smallpox inoculations for all of his troops.
In 1905, in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, the Supreme Court ruled that the city of Cambridge was within its rights to require all residents to be vaccinated against smallpox: “In every well ordered society, charged with the duty of conserving the safety of its members, the rights of the individual in respect of his liberty may at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subjected to such restraint.”
More than a century later, this commonsense view is somehow a fresh shock, and a shocking assault on do-whatcha-wanna absolutists.
But as we’ve said before, as recently as 2014, all of this let-COVID-be-COVID nonchalance would still have been considered outrageous.
That year, the caucuses of both parties in the Missouri Senate unanimously passed a mandate that students at Missouri colleges had to be vaccinated against meningitis. A couple of students had died, and officials naturally wanted to protect young people.
Today, most unnaturally, that’s no longer the case.
With lives at stake, Schmitt should stop nodding along and start thinking for himself. But with votes at stake, ahead of this year’s U.S Senate race, he won’t.