Feds want to track your vaccine status — NJ’s Van Drew says no (Opinion)

There’s very little to no silver lining in the government's pressure for everyone to vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate. But the one thing that, so far, has made this whole thing seem a little bit more palatable is the fact that it still feels like a choice.

In other words, unless you have a knee in your back and a gun to your head, no one is being "forced" to get vaccinated.

Maybe you’ve decided not to travel if you don’t want to take the jab. Perhaps you have given up your job when an employer pressured you to get it. So far, those who preferred to keep their vaccination status between themselves and their doctors have been able to do so.

But now, a new federal bill, H.R. 550, AKA the Immunization Infrastructure Modernization Act, has been floated by House Democrats and it’s everything that freedom-loving Americans fear: Being tracked by the government. More specifically, being tracked relative to a medical issue.

This bill would provide $400 million in taxpayer dollars to fund a computer database that would track and record when vaccine doses have been administered to individuals.

You can read the bill here.

Up until now the only way to prove that you had received the injection for COVID-19 was to either verbally attest to it or to show a paper card that was easy to duplicate and seemed relatively benign. It's still startling when freedom-loving Americans have to “show their papers” anywhere, but HR 550 would develop the infrastructure for the government to keep track of exactly who is and who isn’t—and to use that information as they see fit. Scary.

Does this make you uneasy? Well, it does for Congressman Jeff Van Drew.

Van Drew, a former State Senator who was elected to Congress as a Democrat in 2018 and then flipped to Republican in 2020, faithfully voted no on the bill.

In a press release, Van Drew called out what would be the bill’s inherent overreach: Tracking unvaccinated people and recording personal health decisions made by private American citizens.

He decried taxpayer dollars being used to store people’s private medical information saying, “This majority in Congress is doing everything in their power to seize control of Americans and exert federal control in every aspect of our daily lives.”

It’s good to know that there are actually people in Washington fighting for your freedom and your medical privacy.

Opinions expressed in the post above are those of New Jersey 101.5 talk show host Judi Franco only.

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