Op-Ed: Open Letter to Idaho House Speaker Scott Bedke & Senate President Pro Tempore Chuck Winder (September 7, 2021)
By Joseph Gish • September 10, 2021Dear Speaker Bedke & President Pro Tempore Winder,
It has recently been brought to my attention that you can coordinate with each other to bring the Idaho Legislature back into session after the decision was made to recess instead of adjourn the House.
I strongly urge you to bring the legislature back into session to address vaccine mandates private corporations are implementing as a condition of continued employment. These mandates will further erode the social contract Idaho citizens have with their government, divide Idahoans, ruin livelihoods, and endanger public health.
It is becoming very apparent that one of the many casualties of the COVID-19 pandemic is the destruction of the social contract between our government’s public health agencies and the citizens they are supposed to serve. All of us have opinions about the validity of the rationale used to justify our government’s response to the COVID-19 health crisis, but we can all agree that trust in public health agencies is being damaged by those public health agencies setting policy expectations only to later have ground truth prove that those expectations were false.
We were all promised that getting vaccinated would protect us from getting infected and spreading COVID-19 to others. Now we learn that after six months the vaccine effectiveness wanes and that the vaccinated are as likely or more likely to spread the virus as the unvaccinated. We were also told immunity from vaccination is more durable than the natural immunity created by being infected and then recovering. We now see studies out of Israel and Sweden that natural immunity is broader and more durable than immunity from vaccination. Now because the vaccines did not live up to the promises made by the “experts”, we are told to yet again mask up and get booster shots. When recently asked if data indicates booster shots will help, head of the CDC Rochelle Walensky said “So, there’s actually hope – we don’t have data yet”. Confusion, mistrust and fear is the result of policy based on hope instead of an objective analysis of data. It is time to stop, take a step back and look to the emerging data to drive public policy instead of letting fear brought by mismanaged expectations drive our actions. Idahoans need you to bring the legislature into session and place a pause on private vaccine mandates at least until the an objective analysis of the data can overcome the fear that is driving these policies that will hurt and divide Idahoans.
Very soon thousands Idahoans will be losing their livelihoods as the private companies they work for implement vaccine mandates as a condition of their employment. These mandates are not a corporate extension of rational public health policy, but a reaction to the fear brought on by the false expectations set by our public health agencies. The truth of how our government handled this pandemic will eventually be brought out by the data, but how many lives will be ruined in the meantime? We must limit the damage to Idahoans as we wait for this data to come out. We must all step back and take a breather.
We are a republic based on individual rights and those rights should not be violated even if a collective public good can be credibly argued. Individual rights must certainly prevail during this time of confusion and fear created by poor policy. Medical ethics have always protected the individual patient and center around ‘advise and consent’. Each individual must be informed of the risks of any medical procedure and then consent to treatment. These are difficult decisions without having one’s livelihood become an additional consideration.
It is frightening to watch Idaho healthcare providers announce vaccine mandates that will terminate staff at the very same time Governor Little is calling out the National Guard to assist with the surge in patients admitted to our hospitals. Idahoans know this makes no sense, endangers public health and that it is immoral to terminate the very frontline workers who have risked their own health to care for Idahoans throughout this pandemic. Will you allow our amazing healthcare workers, who saved the lives of Idahoans, to be terminated for exercising ‘advise and consent’ when it comes to their own health?
Speaker Bedke and President Pro Tempore Winder, you are the only Idahoans who can keep thousands of your fellow citizens from losing their livelihoods while the experts throw darts at this virus and “hope” one of them hits its target. Currently available data proves the false logic of dividing Idahoans by vaccination status since this data shows that both the vaccinated and unvaccinated are being infected and spreading COVID-19. You must call the Idaho Legislature into session and pass legislation banning vaccine mandates for both public and private entities in the State of Idaho. Every day more and more data proves vaccine mandates are not only a violation of our individual liberty, but also have no benefit to public health.
By not calling the Idaho Legislature into session so our elected representatives can address private corporate vaccine mandates, you become responsible for the harm done to your fellow Idahoans when they lose their livelihoods and our hospitals become short staffed. Nothing good will come from your lack of action. On the contrary, your lack of action will only further harm and divide Idahoans. It will also further erode the social contract between the citizens and their government.
Please call the Idaho Legislature into session.
Sincerely,
Joseph Gish
Tags: Chuck Winder, Covid-19, Idaho Legislature, Joseph Gish, Scott Bedke
11 thoughts on “Op-Ed: Open Letter to Idaho House Speaker Scott Bedke & Senate President Pro Tempore Chuck Winder (September 7, 2021)”
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Agreed!
Thanks for the article. We’d all like to think our elected representative would actually protect our constitutional rights.
Yet Bedke is probably too busy planning his next Kangaroo Court in order to take down political opponents.
And Winder is probably too busy meeting with the communist teacher’s union, bowing to the idaho statesman, and planning items to bring up next session such as Critical Waste Theory.
They just may not have time right now for We The People or to be bothered by the Constitution or their elected obligations.
I never signed the social contract between our government’s public health agencies and the citizens they are supposed to serve. They have no legal right over my health decisions. Neither does the State or Federal Government.
Why in the world are we allowing unelected health tyrants to dictate (illegal) health policy that has already killed thousands of lives, destroyed businesses and employee livelihoods and many constitutional freedoms of Idahoans; all the while, Rhinos Little and his sidekick Bedke, are fiddling while Idaho burns its economy and kill and injures it’s citizens with a non-tested, low efficacy, poisonous chemical soup.
In the meantime, coronavirus.idaho.gov is running another lying ad about the “safety and effectiveness of the clot-shot paid for by your tax dollars!
The issue of my healthcare is a personal and private matter that should only be between my doctor and myself not between government and myself. So many politicians, judges, bureaucrats and unelected officials are practicing medicine without a license which is criminal according to the laws of our state. Masks are by definition a medical device and a medical treatment and yet they are being mandated by so many that are not doctors. The last time I wore a mask for any length of time it ended up in my being hospitalized for almost a week in intensive care and yet my own doctor will not give me a medical exemption because of pressure put on him by those who are not doctors. Judges are charging criminal defendants with failure to appear and contempt of court because they are not allowed to access the courts unless they wear a medical device which many studies have concluded do more harm than good. Inmates are being stripped and placed in “cold rooms” in Ada County if they refuse to wear masks. Many of these mandates are based upon irrational fears that are caused by media sensationalism, distorted data and statistics and blatantly false marketing propaganda. And now the powers that be wish to force an experimental gene therapy with undisclosed proprietary elements to be injected into the bodies of men, women and children for which no long term studies have been accomplished. Turning citizens into lab rats to be experimented on is not my idea of freedom! If freedom means anything it certainly encompasses freedom to make decisions regarding medical treatments for ourselves. This has been a God-given sacred right which Americans have enjoyed from the founding of our country until now. Informed consent for medical treatments was the ruling at Nuremberg for good reason. Shall we so cavalierly disregard the lessons that history has taught us in order to placate our irrational fears and media generated hysteria? I think with many others that that would be a monumental mistake with dangerous, long-term repercussions. It is past time for the law-makers of our state to stop allowing the executive and judicial branches of our government to make laws that have such a huge effect on the lives of Idahoans. The vast majority in our state understand that this so-called emergency is being fueled by federal dollars and politics. The vaccine mandates for workers is blatantly discriminatory and considering the fact that there is no liability being assumed by either employers or vaccine manufacturers, it leaves the worker no legal remedy when one’s health is damaged or death occurs as a direct result of coerced and forced medical treatment as has occurred in thousands of reported cases. It is time that Idaho legislators step up and assume their responsibility and role as legislators and cease and desist allowing others to usurp their authority in making laws that govern the good people of this state!
I have a friend that is a 2 tour combat veteran of the Middle East with 5 children having to quit his job at D&B because of this tyrannical unconstitutional disaster.
That is a microscopic view that will never hit the news.
Get back in session and do your damn jobs!
This is America not communist China!!!!
D&B should know better.
They and others could easily divide their companies up into cohesive under 100 employee units working together for the same cause.
May your friend quickly find better and more fruitful employment.
This is just another overreach by the traitor in the White House and other treasonous democrats in congress to force their will on us poor, ignorant peasants who are too stupid to know what’s good for us. We live in Idaho because we don’t want government telling us what to do, now it has forced its way into our work and homes. Enough is enough. If we don’t fight we die. All sort of slogans and quotes come to mind from the past:
Give me Liberty or give me death
Better dead than red
The tree of Liberty needs to be refreshed by the blood of patriots on occasion.
We had better wake up and say no more or our last finger hold on our country, and our freedom, will be gone.
Do your damn jobs !
The government must release the true medicines (which president trump took) that will cure the covidflu and allow the doctors to do their job.
Big pharma receiving
millions from covidflu shots/boosters are giving kickbacks to governors throughout the United States, all federal agencies, and bidenama entire admin to push the hazardous China fauci shot/booster.
Watch on u-tube or rumble
Steve Bannon on the War Room who interviewed several doctors that have shown the truth on what is actually happening and why.
Little needs to go along with those who are part of the swamp.
It says a lot that none of them (not LIttle, Bedke nor Winder) were willing to step in to protect the employees from the hospitals (big pharma getting tons of federal benefits), BUT now LIttle is immediately vowing to step in on behalf of the big businesses to protect them from government overreach. 🙁
I think it is something that every voter in Idaho needs to remember in the upcoming election.