How to Create Your Own Vaccine Mandate and Help Protect Us All

The federal government, including the US military and state and local municipalities, are now requiring Covid vaccinations, and have given express deadlines - maybe it's time for you to do so as well.

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(A portion of this article was initially published in July and has been republished now with a few updates and necessary changes. Please send it out to everyone you know to help to stop the spread.)

In late July, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported drastic increases across the country in the number of people contracting COVID-19. More than 97% of people getting hospitalized in July with Covid-19 were unvaccinated and Los Angeles County recorded more than 10,000 coronavirus cases a week.

The emergency has now shifted to the South, to states like Mississippi and Tennessee, where some of the vaccination rates are the lowest across the country. August has seen an extreme rise in these numbers, with many hospitals reporting a shortage of ICU beds, and some paramedic teams have had periods of time where they were not able to respond to calls at all.

Since July 30, the seven-day case rate in Baltimore County, Maryland, has increased 376%, pushing Baltimore County within the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's "substantial" transmission zone (50-99 cases per 100,000 residents) as vaccination rates vary from community to community.)

Baltimore has now declared a state of emergency, which allows them to mandate specific protocols to protect the health and safety of its residents. Considering that Dr. Fauci has now expanded the timeline for “possibly” resolving the pandemic from fall of this year to spring of next year, it might be time for all of us to pitch in and declare our own state of emergency conditions within our own homes and environments.

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The federal government has some specific authority to curtail certain Civil Rights of US Citizens, when the enacted law or regulation serves to directly protect the health of the public. You certainly have the right to do this in your own home and with your extended family, to protect yourselves and help the country to stop this virus.

The problem of people refusing to get vaccinated is no longer isolated with regard to only harming those who refuse to help themselves and their communities — it is hurting us all with the threat of a never-ending pandemic, and it is hurting our chances for any kind of real economic recovery nationwide. This means that for many of us, it is time to take a stand against our very own family members, if necessary, and apply some regulations of our own. 

I have been writing about the ongoing struggle between my mother and my aunt with regard to getting vaccinated, and my mom’s brave decision to do her personal and civic duty and take a stand. The concept of drawing boundaries with your QAnon family might sound easy in theory, but the truth is that confronting people who are fully entrenched in a cult mentality can be difficult, even for those of us who are trained to be confrontational.

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My mother took great care to craft the message she sent to my aunt that defined her new boundaries, so I thought I should share it as a template to help everyone get started. Sometimes it is hard to find the right words to say in any situation and I suspect many people have just been avoiding confrontation altogether since 2016. 

Here is the message my mother sent to my aunt that can be cut and pasted and sent in text or email form. You could even call your family members and read it to them if that makes you more comfortable. Maybe you will luck out and get sent to voicemail and you can read it to them that way.

Good Morning (name here), 

I hope you are having a great time at (place of location) this summer and staying cool. I have just learned that infection with COVID (all variants) is up nationwide. It’s higher in (the South or area you want to focus on) due to the fact that so many people have not been vaccinated. I would never forgive myself if you got COVID —and/or God forbid died of it — or any of your family got it as a result of going (with me in the car or to my house) without being immunized. 

So, as much as I will miss seeing you next week, the lack of vaccination on your part is a deal-breaker. If it is important to you to not be vaccinated, for whatever reason, then that’s your choice. However, something that has been lost lately is the understanding that if you have not been vaccinated, you should still be wearing a mask- EVERYWHERE outside your home. The coronavirus is out there, multiplying exponentially because people are refusing to be vaccinated, and you are at greater risk of contracting it, especially without wearing a mask in public. 

With very little exception, those hospitalized and those dying of coronavirus have not been vaccinated. I don’t know whether the news services you hear are telling you this, and I’m sure the social media you listen to is not telling you this so I am telling you now. This is based on fact and not opinion, and you need to hear it from someone who loves you and cares about your health and the health of your family. I’m not suggesting that the people who are encouraging you to not get the vaccination don’t care about you. I am suggesting that they are dangerously misinformed about the facts of this pandemic and have been listening to political rhetoric from people who have their own agenda. 

The coronavirus is REAL. It KILLS people. It is once again spreading out of control, but now it has at least 4 variants. The longer it goes uncontrolled, it will continue to mutate and become more dangerous and deadly. Children are now becoming infected at much higher rates and dying at much higher rates than when it was first identified. The stock market had a huge drop due to fear over the resurgence of the virus. It will not be brought under control until as many people as possible worldwide are VACCINATED. 

That was all fact-based information. Now I’ll give you an opinion. It’s really very much like POLIO, in the sense that POLIO has been effectively eradicated because people realized that vaccination was the way to wipe it out. And they vaccinated EVERYBODY. People didn’t stand up and say, I’ll take my chances with my kids not being able to walk or having to be put into an iron lung because I don’t want anybody else telling me what to do. They got vaccinated. 

I don’t really know why you have neglected to be vaccinated. But now, there is scientific information that people with compromised immune systems (that includes name here) have a much harder time building antibodies after vaccination, and therefore may need to get a booster shot to have enough antibodies to protect them. I feel a great responsibility to myself, my family, and my community to be vaccinated. I will not help to perpetuate this virus and allow it to keep mutating and infecting even more people with potentially deadly results. 

I really don’t understand why you don’t feel the same way. I wrote this down not to prevent a conversation, but to begin one and so that my words were clear and hopefully not misconstrued. If you want to have a conversation about this issue, I’d be happy to. I will not be spending time with anyone that I have reason to believe has not been vaccinated and this will include during the holidays. 

I love you, 

(Your name here with your choice of emoji if you like 🤪) 

Feel free to use it word for word or change it however you feel it will best help your cause. I also recommend that you write down a few bullet points that are important to you about why you want them to get vaccinated, in the event that you have a follow-up phone call and emotions get heated. I have underlined passages of the template message with links to credible news sources that are the least controversial I can find. You can keep them or not, but these linked articles will also provide you with some great bullet points for any conversation you might have to have later.

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If you are nervous and do not like confrontation, write it all down and just read it, it will help. I also want to tell you that no one really likes confrontation, except for a few twisted people who need medical attention. Even those who do it well can have a hard time with it. I hate confrontation, but I won’t shy away from it because I hate the result of not confronting problems more. My mother, the former judge, wants you to know it was not easy to draw this line with my aunt and to call her out when she apparently lied, so don’t be hard on yourself. 

You can also read my other two articles in this series, Trump Shockwaves are Still Dividing Usand The Latest QAnon Rumorif you need any more inspiration. Good luck and Godspeed. Feel free to leave a comment if you are struggling or need advice. Thank you for being a good citizen and family member, I appreciate how hard this is for you, but drastic times call for drastic measures and taking a stand. I appreciate your courage in speaking out.

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Amee Vanderpool writes the SHERO Newsletter and is an attorney, published author, contributor to newspapers and magazines, and analyst for BBC radio. She can be reached at avanderpool@gmail.com or follow her on Twitter @girlsreallyrule.

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