Author: Blazingcatfur

The liberal justices of the Supreme Court made repeated false claims during oral arguments on the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate Friday.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer in particular made a number of false statements, ranging from claims about the nature of the Omicron variant to basic facts and statistics about the state of the pandemic in the United States.

Ambulances in Kansas speed toward hospitals then suddenly change direction because hospitals are full. Employee shortages in New York City cause delays in trash and subway services and diminish the ranks of firefighters and emergency workers. Airport officials shut down security checkpoints at the biggest terminal in Phoenix and schools across the nation struggle to find teachers for their classrooms.

The current explosion of omicron-fueled coronavirus infections in the U.S. is causing a breakdown in basic functions and services — the latest illustration of how COVID-19 keeps upending life more than two years into the pandemic.

As omicron sweeps through North America, the U.S. and Canadian responses couldn’t be more different. U.S. states are largely open for business, while Canada’s biggest provinces are shutting down.

The difference partly comes down to arithmetic: The U.S. health care system, which prioritizes free markets, provides more hospital beds per capita than the government-dominated Canadian system does.

“I’m not advocating for that American market-driven system,” said Bob Bell, a physician who ran Ontario’s health bureaucracy from 2014 to 2018 and oversaw Toronto’s University Health Network before that. “But I am saying that in Canada, we have restricted hospital capacity excessively.”

There is no way to make vaccination against COVID-19 truly mandatory, unless those refusing the shot are thrown in jail or physically restrained and forcibly injected. Lesser forms of coercion, such as regular fines for the unvaccinated, or existing government mandates that require vaccination in order to gain entry to, say, a restaurant, are also flagrant intrusions into Canadian’s basic rights.