What Did You Say?

Daniel Horowitz Op-ed: Trauma victim with health issues arrested for not wearing a mask at doctor’s office

Daniel Horowitz | August 05, 2022

Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/horowitz-trauma-masks-doctors-2657813511.html/

Imagine a doctor refusing to treat a patient until he stops engaging in orgies that put him at risk of contracting monkeypox. Well, he would be following the science and data a lot more than those refusing service to those who don’t get the shots or wear masks, but unlike in the latter cases, that doctor would be out of a job and up to his neck in civil rights lawsuits. The time has come to even the score on discrimination and human rights.

Rayne Barton of Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, doesn’t have the luxury of avoiding the doctor. With diabetes, chronic heart problems, kidney disease, and spinal stenosis, Barton needs to constantly see doctors and get prescriptions refilled. Yet, as the Epoch Times reports, she has been banned from all Penn Medicine facilities since Feb. 17, 2022, because of mask disputes. On July 22, Hypertension and Kidney Specialists, an independent doctor’s office in Lancaster, called the police on her after she was told to leave the premises during a mask dispute. She was forced to ride in the back of a police car with her hands behind her back, despite her painful back condition.

How is this allowed to happen in America? How can a policy as inhumane, immoral, and illogical as covering one’s breathing holes be allowed to stand after being repudiated for two and a half years? How is free breathing not a basic human right, especially for those with disabilities, or at least covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act and anti-discrimination law? Companies often spend millions of dollars complying with ADA requirements for customers, yet here they can discriminate against trauma victims when it costs them nothing and when they are free to wear masks themselves if they believe they work, a proposition refuted by the very reality of the virus still spreading unrestrained in all of the most masked places in the world.

Most Americans are no longer affected by the masks because the powers at be smartly lifted the mandates for the majority of people headed into the election. But for people affected the most – those with disabilities needing to see the doctor often – it is still a devastating human rights violation. And unless we extirpate this inhumane treatment from our society, it will be reinstated on all of us intermittently.

The Epoch Times reports that Barton is incapable of placing a mask over her face because she is a victim of childhood trauma. She was attacked by a group of boys as a kid and had dirt stuffed down her mouth, which is why she can’t cover her mouth to this day without it triggering a panic attack. Even for medical interventions that have scientific rationale (and don’t have the option of others utilizing it, as does mask-wearing), we always make exceptions for those with disabilities. What has become of us as human beings that we are still engaging in this sort of behavior long after the “my mask protects you but not me” absurdity has been thoroughly debunked?

The time has come to codify medical discrimination into civil rights and ensure that nobody can ever be denied treatment on account of not getting a shot or wearing a mask. There is never a scientific or moral rationale for such a requirement, and it is clear that it is all promoted through the misinformation propagated by the federal government. Masking only became a thing because of government intervention; it therefore must be uprooted with a display of state government power.

The slate is not clean when it comes to the private sector and discrimination law, especially in something like medical treatment, which is often (especially in a hospital) designated as a public accommodation. They cannot discriminate against people even when their behaviors are proven to cause their ailments. Can hospitals turn away the recurring patients who are on their third drug overdose in as many months? Can they refuse to treat the gunshot victim who himself had been involved in multiple gang shootings? Can they deny treatment for monkeypox if the patient attended a super-spreader orgy that is almost exclusively responsible for the spread of the virus? Until they can, there is no moral or scientific rational for allowing doctors to deny organ transplants to people without shots or care for people who don’t cover their human breathing holes.

Emerging from the past two years of COVID fascism without instituting major legal and political protections against abuse of bodily autonomy would be like not addressing box cutters on planes after 9/11. Yet few Republicans care to act. They have a pre-March 2020 mindset about what we face in government, the medical cartel, and the globalist entities like the World Economic Forum and the WHO, all manipulated by China in the background. Policymakers are slyly choosing to subject only medical facilities and the military to continued regulations so as not to enrage the majority of the electorate, but make no mistake, those people are worth fighting for. Also, we will all continue to suffer from assaults on freedom if we don’t push for new civil rights concerning medical freedom. Such a plan would include:

• Updating the Civil Rights Act of 1964, so that employers, retailers, hospitals, schools, and others would not be able to discriminate against individuals based on refusal to wear a mask or get a shot, just like they can’t discriminate based on sex, race, or religion. We the Patriots USA has delivered a petition to do just that to all the members of Congress. Red states with supermajorities could easily do this on the state level next session.
• Subject anyone who forces someone to wear a mask or get a shot to liability for damage from masks or shots.
• Threaten the nonprofit status of any hospital that engages in such discrimination.
• Pass a patient bill of rights.
• Pass a digital health privacy bill of rights.

Remember, none of these policies organically emerged from the free market. They were all ultimately mandated or manipulated by the federal government. States must fight power with power. If we had a true free market, even a minority of doctors who don’t believe in masks would be able to advertise and place themselves on a list for people like Barton to use. But they would be targeted for loss of board certification or even state medical licenses.

It is shocking that even as the Biden administration declares a second public health emergency on top of COVID, Republicans have not even made reversal of these policies a centerpiece of their campaign platforms. Let us not forget the admonition of founder John Dickinson: “All artful rulers, who strive to extend their own power beyond its just limits, endeavor to give to their attempts, as much semblance of legality as possible. Those who succeed them may venture to go a little farther; for each new encroachment will be strengthened by a former.” COVID fascism must be destroyed – root and branch – if we are to have a shot at precluding the next wave of encroachments on our bodies.