This is an ominous development, reported by Jack Phillips for The Epoch Times:

A federal judge on Oct. 8 denied a request to block Michigan State University’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate on the basis of natural immunity.

An employee at the school, Jeanna Norris, filed a lawsuit against the mandate and asked a judge to intervene on the basis that she had already contracted COVID-19 and recovered. She presented two antibody tests showing her previous infection, and her doctors told her that she didn’t need to get the vaccine at this time. …

“This Court must apply the law from the Supreme Court: Jacobson essentially applied rational basis review and found that the vaccine mandate was rational in ‘protect[ing] the public health and public safety,’” Maloney said in his order. “The Court cannot ignore this binding precedent.”

The judge can refer to “binding precedent,” but being bound to a level of precedent doesn’t mean being bound to find a rational basis.  That’s what the judge is judging.

Unfortunately, our country’s elite have decided that natural/acquired immunity does not count when it comes to COVID-19.  No legal or medical argument will suffice because it’s become a marker of class.  Enlightened people want mandates; a Supreme Court ruling from a quarter-century before the discovery of Penicillin and addressing a disease that had killed around one-seventh of the people who caught it in Boston before the advent of inoculation (roughly 1 in 14 of the entire population) says government has this power; so the enlightened people will have their way, no matter how much science or how many tests dissidents might produce.

To repeat a point made in this space often:  What terrifies the enlightened people most of all is the prospect that government might not be able to force everybody to do these things.  Freedom is the disease that terrifies them so, and they can’t imagine a variant that might turn on them.

In this light, nobody should expect the courts to stand up for the rights of the people.  The rights of the people are the crux of the dispute, and they have been erased.

Featured image by Eskay Lim on Unsplash.