If California Gov. Gavin Newsom believes vaccination against COVID-19 is so important that it warrants mandates for all children attending public schools, then why is he fighting a court order requiring that state prison guards be vaccinated?
For the same reason he hasn’t mandated that public school teachers be vaccinated — money and politics.
For months now, Newsom has joined the state prison guards’ union, one of his biggest political donors and one of the state’s most powerful unions for years, in resisting a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for prison workers. The thing is, prisons should be a top priority for vaccination. COVID-19 spreads easily within them and puts both workers and prisoners at risk.
In September, U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar ruled that a mandate is necessary to “lower the risk of preventable death and serious medical consequences among incarcerated persons.” Newsom is so concerned that COVID-19 might spread in public school classrooms that he is requiring all schoolchildren (who are far less vulnerable than adult prisoners) to get the shot as soon as they are eligible. So surely he would agree that the spread of the virus requires extraordinary measures in prisons?
All I can say is, schoolchildren don’t donate as much to Newsom’s campaign as teachers and prison guards.
Teachers are exempt from Newsom’s school vaccine mandate because, unlike the student body, the teachers unions donated millions of dollars to help save Newsom from his Sept. 14 recall election. Similarly, the prison guards’ union cut a $1.75 million check to Newsom’s recall defense fund in August.
And this is how he’s repaying them: by hypocritically carving out special exemptions to vaccine mandates.
Newsom doesn’t care about public health. He doesn’t even care about the coronavirus, as his own actions have proven. Newsom cares about power, and schoolchildren don’t have any.
