Vaccine Mandates Extend Throughout America
Following New York City’s lead, New Orleans and San Francisco will impose similar mandates targeting businesses and city offices starting this month, while Los Angeles has its own vaccine mandated measures. In major cities across America, citizens are individually losing their right of choice.
New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell defined proof of vaccination as the “best way to protect businesses”. She stated that she is “not imposing capacity limits or contemplating a shutdown similar to the one that devastated businesses in 2020”. “Unlike this time last year, we have a tool [vaccines] that we did not have,” she said.
Over the past month, Louisiana has set daily records for the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19, reaching 2,907 patients on Friday. Ninety-one percent of those hospitalized are unvaccinated, according to state data.
Louisiana’s Governor, John Bel Edwards, stated “We are rapidly getting to the point where we could have a major failure of our health care delivery system.”
39% of Louisiana’s population is fully vaccinated.
48% of Louisiana’s residents have taken at least one dose.
So far, 20 other states already, or plan to, prohibit vaccine passports, protect the citizen’s rights, and ban public entities from demanding any form of vaccine proof.
States Who Have, or Plan To, Ban Vaccine Passports:
Arkansas
Idaho
Kansas
Michigan
North Dakota
South Carolina
Texas
Utah
States Against Vaccine Passports
Oklahoma
Tennessee
States For Vaccine Passports
Hawaii
New York
Louisiana
California
States With a Neutral Stance
Illinois
Maine
Maryland
Kentucky
Nevada
New Jersey
North Carolina
Ohio
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Virginia
West Virginia
Washington
In Los Angeles, Gavin Newsom said “all employees at public and private schools in California will have to show proof of vaccination or show negative results of weekly testing”.
The Effect on Small Businesses
Yelp reported that of the restaurants marked as “closed” on their platform, 61% are permanently shut down. Retail businesses and nightlife saw more than 50% of closures become permanent. Many historic small businesses closed their doors to a situation controlled by a combination of politicians, legislators, and scientists, who get their paychecks no matter what happens. The hardest working people were the ones deemed non-essential, and the ones ultimately effected the most by the lockdowns and pandemic.
How will vaccine mandates effect small business owners, as unvaccinated customers are refused service? Is there proof that the current 51% of vaccinated Americans nationwide are the average individual customers of small businesses? Could this be another tactic to monopolize corporate business bringing forced commercial revenue to a dying free market?
Millions of small businesses shut their doors during last year’s lockdowns across the country. Continued mandates and restrictions to customer base, does not improve their chances of a comeback. Is the future of traditional business doomed? Will American business owners be able to adapt to continued hardship resulting from each state’s varied ability to protect the rights of its citizens from what would be a federal mandate in countries without a constitution?