Welcome to the commentary on magazine daily podcast.

Today is Tuesday, October 12, 2021. I am John Puthhord, the editor of commentary magazine with me as always executive editor,

Greenwald Hyab, senior writer, Christine Rosen, Hyakristeen, and associate editor Noah Rothman, Hy Noah.

Hyakr. So we are closing in on 80% of the country having gotten at least one dose of the vaccine, of one of the three vaccines.

18 and up is at 78% as of today, which means that by Friday, I think we should be at 80, 12 and up is at 76. All ages are at 65, because obviously people wonder 12 of not yet been approved for the vaccine.

And yet the culture war over the so-called vaccine mandates appears to be heating up Texas governor Greg Abbott announcing yesterday that he is.

It's a little confusing. He is attaching to a piece of legislation in Texas, a refusal to allow any entity to have a vaccine mandate, which I guess presumably means not only governmental state local entities, but private ones as well, which would seem to be a violation of elementary conservative and Republican ideas about the rights of private businesses to conduct their business.

As they see fit and simultaneously, we have a bizarre fact, I would say, in terms of vocabulary, which is the use of the word mandate.

So a mandate according to the dictionary is an official decree or government rule or official rule.

And we, in fact, when you say so the government can mandate vaccines under circumstances or mandate things under circumstances in which they have control of certain institutions that are governmentally run like schools or like the military or like the places of public employment.

Or things like that, the word mandate is improperly used when it refers to a private business like American Airlines declaring that every one of its employees needs to be vaccinated or they will be subject to dismissal that is not a mandate.

Private businesses set their own rules and terms as long as they are congruent with state local and federal law.

And everything is now dovetailing together so that what's more, I think, and this is the last sort of point I'll make in this monologue, it's a month or something since Joe Biden said that he was going to impose a vaccine mandate on the country in some fashion using the occupational safety and health administration.

I don't believe that those rules have been promulgated. I don't think that document exists that OSHA has gone through whatever process OSHA has to go through before it sends all of those documents to everybody, every, you know, business in the country.

Of the sort of thing that it does, let's say if you run a chemical business or something like that about what the safety protocols might be handling hazardous materials.

Or whatever, I don't think that document exists, which means in fact that the vaccine mandates nationally are not in place and are not enforceable because there is no vaccine mandate and when a private business like American Airlines says you're getting vaccinated or you are not coming to work.

Again, that's not a mandate that is a workplace rule being set by an employer and everybody is jumbling everything together to say that American Airlines is having, you know, success because 98 or 99% of its employees have now gotten the jab is not to say that Biden has succeeded with his vaccine mandate.

That is actually American Airlines saying we're not going to put, you know, we need you to be vaccinated. We can't have you not vaccinated.

Don't come to work or we will initiate dismissal. So whatever it is, if you if you do that and apparently it was sufficient until the day to get their workforce to full strikes.

Yeah, that's fair. You think United Airlines, for example, is a better example because they they they have like 98% vaccination, something on these lines because they dismissed everybody who wasn't vaccinated.

It's an easy way to get to almost 100% when you just put everybody on unpaid leave who isn't vaccinated.

I'm probably writing on this today and I only have so many thoughts. So if you read my piece later, you know, forgive me for being repetitive.

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