Omicron crushes rationale for Chicago, Cook County vaccine passports – Wirepoints

By: Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner

Omicron has wiped out the rationale for vaccine passports in Chicago and Cook County. The fact that the vaccinated can spread the virus like the unvaxxed now renders the entire mandate worthless. Officials have no excuse not to get rid of it.

The vaccine passport mandate was implemented in early January and called for all unvaxxed residents five years and older to present proof of vaccine at restaurants, bars and gyms or be denied service. Officials partially based their mandate on the premise that passports would help prevent transmission from the unvaxxed to the vaxxed. Keep out the unvaxxed, they argued, and the vaccinated could safely congregate in crowded places. From the City of Chicago’s press release:

“This new requirement will not eliminate COVID risk, but it will help ensure a much safer indoor environment for fully vaccinated Chicagoans, as well as for the employees working in these higher-risk settings.”

That was a false premise under Delta that’s only become more obvious under Omicron. Study after study shows vaccines are unable to stop the vaccinated from transmitting the virus to others, including other vaxxed. That means passports aren’t really “protecting” anyone from transmission.

“Once infected, the vaccinated were just as likely to transmit COVID to people in their own households as the unvaccinated: about a quarter of both did so. They also found that the asymptomatic infection rate among vaccinated and unvaccinated participants was similar: around 30 percent.” – Scientific American “The Risk of Vaccinated COVID Transmission Is Not Low”

“Although fully vaccinated people were less likely to contract an infection, when they did they can transmit the Delta variant at a similar level as unvaccinated people.

‘Breakthrough infections in fully vaccinated people can efficiently transmit infection in the household setting.’” – The Lancet “Community transmission and viral load kinetics of the SARS-CoV-2 delta (B.1.617.2) variant in vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals in the UK”

“Our vaccines are working exceptionally well,” Walensky told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “They continue to work well for Delta, with regard to severe illness and death — they prevent it. But what they can’t do anymore is prevent transmission.” – CDC Director Rachel Walensky on CNN (Official CDC statement from Walensky here.)

The elderly and the comorbid that are the biggest victims of COVID.

If another purpose of the passport is to save lives, then by city and county officials’ own logic, it’s not the unvaccinated they should be targeting. Their restrictions should be directed at the elderly and those with comorbidities, no matter their vaccination status.

The reality is vaccinated elderly people are dying along with the unvaccinated. Vaccinated people with comorbidities are dying, too. In fact, more than a third of all Illinois deaths in the past six weeks have been breakthroughs, again, mostly among the elderly and comorbid. 

Breaking that down, we know that 87 percent of the more than 1,884 breakthrough deaths in Illinois since April 2021 have been of those age 65 and older. 

And we know that since December, deaths of the elderly continue to be 80 percent of all Illinois COVID deaths. (86 percent of all COVID deaths since the start of the pandemic have been in the 60 and over age group.)

And as for comorbidities, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky recently admitted comorbidities play an outsized role in COVID deaths even among the vaccinated: “The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75 percent, occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities…”

Given all that, an effective “passport” would have to ban the elderly and unhealthy from gyms, restaurants and bars to stop vaccinated and unvaccinated people from infecting them. Illegal, yes. Immoral, yes. But according to Cook County and Chicago officials, entirely logical.

And if officials’ rationale is about “bending the curve on hospitalizations,” then passports are not the way to do that. Allowing the vaccinated to congregate in crowded places runs counter to staving off infections.

All they have left is coercion

As the Delta variant, and now Omicron, has made clear, the vaccine might protect you from getting seriously ill or dying – there’s general agreement on that – but it doesn’t keep you from spreading the virus to others. With everybody transmitting, the main rationale for both vaccine mandates and vaccine passports is gone.

And set aside the science for a moment. Most people, even those fully vaxxed, are still clueless about just how impossible it has become to avoid COVID. Take Whoopi Goldberg, for instance, who told her audience: “Wait, what? It was a shock. I’m tripled vaxxed…You just don’t know where it is, who’s got it, who’s passing it…I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do.”

None of this means that you should throw caution to the wind. Everybody should continue to take measures that actually work to reduce spread, including distancing and isolating when infected. But that’s up to individuals. Not the government.

With the other justifications gone, that only leaves one, less advertised, reason for passports: coercion. It’s a backdoor vaccine mandate. Never mind that passport is discriminatory, arbitrary, ineffective and incompatible with a free society, the passport is just another tool to force the unvaxxed to get their shot, including kids as young as five years old.

If officials maintain the mandates, we’ll know that’s the reason why.

Read more about COVID:

• Governor Pritzker’s condescending defense of failing ‘same ‘ol same ‘ol’ COVID policy – Wirepoints
• Hey, Pritzker, leave them kids alone
• Indefensible: Vilification And Hectoring To Vaccinate Children Expands
• Running out of hospital beds is the biggest danger of Omicron? Then why has the Pritzker administration let the supply of ICU beds collapse by nearly 1,000?
• Why No Discussion Of COVID Treatments In Illinois?
• Illinois’ COVID-19 data: Daily update