People on the volcano-stricken island of St. Vincent will be evacuated to certain neighboring islands via cruise ships only if they've been vaccinated against COVID-19, the nation's prime minister said.
Cruise ships have been dispatched to the island that is being partially evacuated after the 4,000-foot high volcano La Soufrière erupted on Friday.
But people have to be vaccinated before they board the cruise ship, Ralph Gonsalves, the prime minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, said at a press conference the day after the eruption.
More than 16,000 people are being evacuated from the "red zones" — the parts of the island in most danger. This map at right shows the danger zones on the island.
Some are due to be temporarily housed in the neighboring islands of St. Lucia, Grenada, Barbados, and Antigua.
But most of the islands would require vaccination before they take anybody in.
Gonsalves has also said some people don't want to evacuate. This could be because of a fear of vaccination, which may in turn prevent them from receiving other government help after the eruption.
"People are very scared of the vaccine and they opt out of coming to a shelter because eventually they would have to adhere to the protocol," the opposition politician Shevern John said, according to Reuters.
My Response
At Fulcrum7, we are not weighing in on the efficacy or morality of vaccines. We have friends on both sides of the issue, and have received articles from both viewpoints. None have been published, by the way..
What we are weighing in on, is the Orwellian aspect of demanding a vaccine passport from people in order for them to enjoy basic Constitutional freedoms. If you have to be ‘vaccinated’ in order to be excavated from a dangerous volcano-stricken island, that is a profoundly troubling development, and one that most Adventists can (or should) agree on.
Covid-19 has provided monocratic governments and ideologues with a perfect opportunity to increase their control over your life, your travel and physical freedoms. Slippery slope meets 2021.
The name “vaccine passports” is sufficiently descriptive. It reveals that such documents will be required to gain physical entry into restaurants, theaters, school buildings, gyms, airports, hotels, and other places that, until now, the public could enter without having to show proof of good health. And now they are being required to even help you in the event of an emergency.
Because we Americans are not yet accustomed to such a requirement, these documents will be controversial regardless of what they’re called.
Vaccine passports began by demanding compliance with novel emergency measures adopted within the past year. What was formulated in an environment of extreme hysteria is now being passed off as normal parts of everyday life.
It Won’t Be Voluntary
The most troubling aspect of Covid-19 reactions is the belief that governments should increase their control over your life by pushing mandatory vaccine passports. It is already being proposed that government, at the very least, should punish businesses and other institutions that do not ‘voluntarily’ adopt vaccines. The Biden administration is amenable to the proposal, and I believe it will happen by the end of 2022.
A reader unfamiliar with the history of government overreach can be forgiven for believing that Americans should welcome the voluntary adoption of such passports by the likes of businesses, schools, and churches. At this point—until the St. Vincent ship evacuation—we were led to believe that the Covid-19 vaccination wasn’t a government imposed requirement, but a voluntary action facilitated by the private sector.
Well, yes. No government in the U.S. has yet imposed a vaccine-passport requirement on private entities, and so any current “exploring” of the use of such documents is not now formally “government-imposed.” Not yet.
The States who have ‘reopened’ (Texas, Florida, Georgia, South Dakota) present a problem to vaccination proponents because they wish to use reopening as a carrot to incentivize people to get the vaccine.
There are significant calls among vaccine proponents for the CDC and the Biden Administration to come out a lot bolder and say, “If you’re vaccinated, you can do all these things. If you are not. You can’t do them.”
The Biden administration and private companies are working to develop a standard way of handling credentials — referred to as “vaccine passports” — that would allow Americans to prove they have been vaccinated against the novel coronavirus.
The effort has gained momentum amid President Biden’s pledge that the nation will start to regain normalcy this summer and with a growing number of companies — from cruise lines to sports teams — saying they will require proof of vaccination before opening their doors again. All this for a pathogen with a 99.6 survival rate.
If my reading of today’s world is accurate, then a distressingly large number of people are delusional.
I see Covid posing to humanity no categorically different threat than is posed by many other pathogens; other people see a terrible threat. I see the reaction to Covid as being disproportionate to Covid’s risks by many orders of magnitude. Other people (including some Seventh-day Adventists) see the hysteria as appropriate, or even in some cases inadequate.
Where I see a combination of craziness and the danger of people treating other persons as emitters of lethal poisons, other people see it as good sense and prudence of each person avoiding death.
Where I see media personalities and government officials working hard to sensationalize and exaggerate Covid’s dangers, other people see trustworthy reporting and dedication to “the facts” and “the science.” Where I see many of these same media personalities and government officials (Fauci et al) doing and saying things that clearly reveal their wish to keep Covid hysteria high and going on for as long as possible, other people see nothing of the sort.
Where I see an utterly unjustified and permanent expansion of government power to superintend and obstruct private behaviors in ways that a mere 14 months ago was unthinkable, other people see government responding humanely to society’s needs, naively assuming that government is willing to abandon those powers when this pandemic is past.
Where I see the Vaccine Passport replacing the Constitution as the epitome of our freedoms, other people see the vaccine as a trendy way of adopting ‘hero’ status as they boast of their vaccine on social media.
Where I see liberal civilization being brutally transformed by a Covidocracy into what David Hart calls a “hygiene socialist” society, other people see civilization being compassionately reset into a safer and more humane arrangement in which, presumably, no one ever again will be killed or even discomforted by pathogens.
Where other people see a dream, I see a nightmare.
I made the prediction in this article that I anticipate that vaccination passports will become obligatory by the end of 2022.
We have a rule in our household, when someone is overtly wrong about something, they are obligated to take a bow to the rest of the people as an humble admission of error.
Right now I bow my head in shame that people who are trapped on an island with an active volcano are refused help if they don’t have a ‘vaccine passport’.
2022. Remember it.
I’ll keep my neck limbered up just in case.
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“He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants. … He will take the tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the Lord will not answer you in that day” (1 Samuel 8:13–18).