Weekly Stories about What’s Happening in Washington State and Stories of Interest to Washingtonians
by Gerald Braude
In this post:
- Links to Radio Show references
- A Policy of Utilitarianism for Washington Government Workers
- Washington State’s Governor Attacks His Own Citizens Commentary by Bob Runnells, ICWA Activist
October 7 Episode of An Informed Life Radio Notes and Links
Guest: James Lyons-Weiler, Ph.D.
- Dr. James Lyons-Weiler’s Substack: Popular Rationalism
- Master Manipulator
- Mary Holland: Who is Dr. Andrew Wakefield?
- Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak
- See the References in this paper for past studies on ivermectin as a “broad-spectrum antiparasitic agent with demonstrated antiviral activity against a number of DNA and RNA viruses: Ivermectin: an award-winning drug with expected antiviral activity against COVID-19.
- Vax Talk on Apple Podcasts
- Amazon.com: Dissolving Illusions eBook : Humphries, Suzanne, Bystrianyk, Roman: Kindle Store
A Policy of Utilitarianism for Washington Government Workers
Utilitarianism is a mathematical equation of sacrificing a few for the benefit of the whole.
In her “Concise Explanatory Statement” for adopting Governor Jay Inslee’s directive for mandating all executive and cabinet agencies to receive the full dosage of primary COVID-19 shots, Brandy Chinn, Rules and Legislative Relations Manager of the Office of Financial Management (OFM) in Washington, demonstrated that this was her policy.
Read the statement here: CES COVID September 2022 Final
In the second of five categories of areas of concern stemming from the 153 public comments about adopting Inslee’s directive, Chinn wrote the following:
“Concerns relating to the safety of the vaccines and often reference VAERS data or individual experiences with adverse vaccine reactions.”
Chinn’s response was as follows:
“Comments were considered but not incorporated in final rule. Both the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention and the Washington Department of Health (DOH) have stated that vaccines are “safe and effective.”
In other words, as far as the OFM was concerned, all the studies and data sent to them was irrelevant to their decision. The VAERS reports of 31,313 deaths following the COVID-19 shots, including 14,696 of those reported in the United States and its territories by the end of September and 205 in Washington were not their concern. They deferred to the CDC.
Furthermore, the OFM states that the purpose of the governor’s directive was to “Establish and maintain a healthy and safe work environment to protect the welfare of all state employees.” But the OFM statement did not take into account that the COVID-19 shots do not prevent transmission of the disease.
In this same second category, Chinn made a further justification:
“As noted by DOH, the vaccines have been shown to be safe in clinical trials, and were developed, tested, and authorized using the same rigorous process used for other successful vaccines. And according to the CDC, ‘Millions of people in the United States have received COVID-19 vaccines under the most intense safety monitoring in US history.’ The CDC, therefore, recommends COVID-19 vaccines for everyone six months and older.”
Anyone following the data and science knows that the above response is mere marketing language, not facts.
Chinn then provided links to the DOH and the CDC. The OFM and the two links never asked, “If the COVID-19 shots have been shown to be safe in clinical trials, and were developed, tested, and authorized using the same rigorous process used for other successful vaccines, why did the FDA ask for seventy-five years until full release of all documents related to the licensing of Pfizer’s Comirnaty COVID vaccine?”
In his ruling that the FDA would have just eight months to release all the data, Judge Mark Pittman of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, quoted President John F. Kennedy, writing, “A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”
Furthermore, the Comirnaty shot as well as all the other FDA approved COVID-19 shots are not readily available in the United States. In other words, the Washington government employees are required to take the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) products, which, by definition, are experimental.
This issue was brought up in the OFM’s Concise Explanatory Statement’s first area of concern that was expressed by written and verbal public comments: “Believe rulemaking violates medical freedom and Nuremberg Code.”
The 1947 Nuremburg Code states that the number one point in a permissible medical experiment is, “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.”
Nuremberg Code — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (ushmm.org)
The OFM response to the Nuremburg Code was as follows: “Comments were considered but mostly not incorporated in final rule. OFM has rulemaking authority under RCW 41.06.133 and RCW 41.06.150. Multiple courts have held vaccine mandates in themselves do not violate the constitution or other laws.”
The OFM did not mention that other courts have ruled that the COVID-19 shot mandates violate medical freedom, such as the most recent case in which the judge ruled the mandate on the New York City police to be invalid.
In a her September 7, 2022 letter to Washington stakeholders and interested parties, Chinn wrote that these experimental shots were “optional” for higher education employers, independent agencies, boards, councils, commissions, and separately elected officials.
A state employee pointed out to the OFM their political discrimination. In a letter to the OFM, the state employee wrote, “By mandating these shots, the state government by default favors people who share the incumbent’s political party affiliation. How does this rule prevent discrimination against people of non-democratic party views?”
This particular employee had immigrated from Russia fifteen years ago, where her mother, during the years of the USSR, was in a similar situation in which she was also mandated to receive vaccines as condition of employment. She wrote to the OFM that she had never imagined she would be asked to risk her life, as her mother had to do, to maintain employment.
Her letter also raised the absence in OFM’s ruling about addressing adverse reactions to the COVID-19 shots. She wrote, “The rule is silent on the actions of the employer, or responsibilities, with regard to those who will experience adverse reactions due to the mandate. The rule is silent on compensations, time off, mandatory reporting, and tracking of workers who will be harmed by the medical intervention required to maintain their employment.”
She further states, “Given that state buildings are open to the public regardless of vaccination status, given that vaccines and boosters do not prevent infection or transmission, to demonstrate that a handful of workers present undue hardship in the workplace, seems like a tax-payers funded legal nightmare.”
Of note about the Washington tax payer funding, through union bargaining, OFM has pledged $41.5 million incentivize state union employees and union workers to get the COVID-19 booster. This figure does not yet include any incentives offered to non-union employees, or other state-related unions which may later add booster-incentives to contracts.
When Governor Inslee first mandated the COVID-19 shots to Washington government employees in October 2021, this employee was granted a religious exemption so long as she exclusively teleworked from home. She could be on site of her facility only during off hours (6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.) or on a Saturday or Sunday. If she needed to pick up or drop off any work products, documents, or files, she had to coordinate with her supervisor for an adjustment of her scheduled work hours so that she could drop off or pick up the necessary items during off hours. Her exemption went into effect on October 18, 2021. Since then, her exemptions and accompanying restrictions have gone under review every sixty days. On August 19, 2022 she was granted another sixty day temporary extension of her religious exemption so long as she stayed clear of her workplace.
Another Washington government employee in her department applied for religious exemption. In her case, human resources decided that because they could not make the proper accommodations for her and, therefore, she was on undue hardship on the workforce, she was fired for refusing to take the COVID-19 shot. She was a specialist who worked in a basement in which she had her own private entrance and was not exposing herself to anyone.
Her six months of unemployment compensation has run out. She has lost her car and is on the verge of losing her house. As a paying union member for thirteen years, she was disappointed that the union did not come to her defense.
Many union employees were surprised that the OFM had adopted the governor’s directive so quickly.
ICWA is surprised the OFM has illegally used rulemaking to adopt a governor’s directive. Directives cannot support rules; rules cannot be adopted to enact directives. Our laws clearly state statutory authority–meaning the legislature has passed a law saying something is law–is required for rules, and the RCW’s cited give no authority for OFM to mandate any medical interventions. Rules are simply laws put into practical terms. If a law does not exist to mandate a medical intervention on state employees, then OFM has not authority to mandate shots via rulemaking. Period.
One state employee says that, for the July 1, 2023-2025 contract, the union never mentioned the directive in their summary of communications. She took the primary series of COVID-19 shots but, because of health reasons, has refused to take the booster even though she says she has an incentive offer of $1,000 to do so. She says that even though the governor’s emergency proclamation is ending at the end of October, she expects managers to be checking documents for the COVID-19 shots even though the new contract won’t be effective until July 2023, and the legislature could vote against the terms and against funding the booster incentives.
One employee who started working for the government early in the pandemic said that she never heard from the union about voting on the contract. She had been allowed to take the religious exemption for the COVID-19 jab. Another union member says she was never informed about the COVID-19 shot requirement in the July, 2023-2025 contract. She had ended up with heart issues from the Johnson & Johnson shot.
Washington State’s Governor Attacks His Own Citizens ~ Has it come to this?
Commentary by Bob Runnells, ICWA Activist
It is shocking how many of the Washington state workers have been thrown to the curb.
Business restrictions permanently closed over 500 establishments. Waves of workers were fired or forced out of the workplace since 2020. Untold numbers have lost their livelihoods.
Why don’t we hear more about the life-altering changes forced on Washingtonians?
If people weren’t fired outright, they were discriminated against, so much so they didn’t have a choice but to leave their position, only hoping to find work elsewhere. This must be bewildering for those employees who followed all the other workplace policies, but were fired for a new requirement.
These job losses were during the extended state of emergency in Washington. Governor Inslee is now sneaking COVID-19 shot requirements into permanent hiring and employment rules: Take the primary doses or prove to your department, such as human resources, that you’re religious enough to qualify for an exemption. If you qualify, then they decide how to segregate and shame you with discriminatory “accommodations” that are not based on any science. If you are able to stay on, you will watch your colleagues receive $1,000 booster-dose incentives (totaling $41.5 million in the two-year budget) even if they already got it. Work prospects will be grim. It will be hard to get a raise and prove your worth when you are forced to work remotely or show up outside normal hours. It’s a work dis-incentive that will create a toxic work environment and ensure low-quality government services.
And if the exempted complain, they are told by those who took the jabs that they’re not upstanding citizens and don’t care about their neighbors, grandparents, and the immunocompromised. Those who are jabbed don’t want to hear that their shot is ineffective and risky. Never mind that the shots don’t prevent infection or transmission—the failed initial goal of the jabs. If the shots don’t prevent infection and transmission, how do they make the workplace safer? The product’s promises have changed so much since Operation Warp Speed that all that is being offered now is a lessening of symptoms for when you do get it—again and again. But be sure to keep taking your boosters (sarcasm), which wane in four months like the primary series. “Test as soon as you have cold symptoms” say the increasing number of pharmaceutical and public service commercials.
Those who’ve taken the shot have a kind of health snobbery rooted in going along with 975 days of emergency edicts and some of the tightest restrictions in the US. Now the Democratic Party governor has issued Directive 22-13.1 to extend emergency vaccination into permanent workforce hiring and employment requirements. His agencies are changing their Washington Administrative Code without proper authority, which is the legislative statute. This is one-sided governor tyranny in which the governor should be nicknamed “Kingslee.”
When the government attacks its law-abiding citizens, it’s time for the citizens to demand change. The political leaders of Washington state have caused human tragedy through restrictions, most arbitrary and not backed by science or history, that closed businesses and ended careers. The citizens of Washington should demand the end of all healthcare mandates and the rehiring (with back pay) of all employees.
Answering the opening question: YES, it has come to the point where our Governor is attacking his own citizens.
