Los Angeles ends its COVID vaccine mandate three years too late

Remember the anti-science fanaticism that led to policies determined by irrational COVID-19 panic? The direct effects carried far into 2024, multiple years after common sense should have prevailed.

The Los Angeles City Council has only now voted to end its COVID-19 vaccine requirement for city workers, unanimously repealing it on Tuesday. In other words, the Los Angeles City Council continued to require COVID-19 vaccination for city workers starting in late 2021 and extending through 2022, 2023, and half of 2024, banning firefighters, police officers, and other city workers from their jobs for, according to one attorney, "two years, nine months, and 22 days."

This is all despite the fact that we knew fairly early on in the pandemic (as in, before the vaccines even rolled out) that the virus was only particularly lethal for the elderly and otherwise unhealthy adults. We knew that those people were the ones who needed to be protected from the virus, not children or physically fit and healthy adults.

But we also knew as early as December 2021 that the vaccine was not stopping the spread of the virus and did not prevent infection. This means that, by December 2021, shortly after Los Angeles enacted this vaccine mandate, we knew that mandating the vaccine for people who were not at serious risk from the virus was not going to help protect vulnerable people, yet Los Angeles kept that mandate in place for another 2 1/2 years.

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COVID-panicked policies such as this are the reason so many people struggled through the pandemic. School closures had no scientific basis, even for teachers, which we knew by March 2021. Masking and social distancing rules were incoherent, which former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci admitted were not based in science two weeks ago. Vaccine mandates for employment were also based on nothing, which we have known since at least December 2021, and yet people were still thrown out of work for years because of it, including up until Tuesday in Los Angeles.

Politicians like those on the Los Angeles City Council allowed fear to control their decision-making, and normal people trying to get by in life paid the price for years. The damage caused by these decisions and their knock-on effects will resonate for years, and those politicians deserve to shoulder the blame for all of it.