An Open Letter Addressed to Hancock College Regarding the Consequences of their Recent Decision to Institute a Vaccine and Mask Mandate policy for All on Campus

In response to the email sent out the morning of 8/11/2021 from President Dr. Kevin G. Walthers concerning his and the board’s decision to institute vaccine and mask mandates for the entire school population, I have very grave concerns about the decision to impose discriminatory medical apartheid on the very population the institution is supposed to serve and aid in bettering their lives. This is especially in light of the lack of scientific evidence concerning the effectiveness of masking and the COVID vaccine, as well as the inhibition it will present in teaching and learning effectively.

As a faculty member, I was never made aware of what was being decided by those above us concerning these issues, and when I asked those above me weeks ago, they had no answers. If there was any sort of meeting held in which faculty could express their concerns about this decision, I was never made aware of it; I found out about everything in the aforementioned 8/11/21 email AFTER the decision had been made. I was never given a chance to voice my concerns and dissent. Thus, I am forced to do so after the fact with this open letter.

What follows will be of some length, but I know of no other way to present what is necessary to explain my position than to do so in a couple pages long open letter. Besides, we are all college/university professionals; we’re quite use to reading lengthy tomes filled with evidence and argument meant to persuade. Thus, I implore you to take a little extra time and read it in full & I apologize for my weakness in being a wordy writer. In summary though, I have serious, professional, moral, and scientific concerns about the vaccine and mask mandates and thus strongly object to their imposition on our campus. And if Hancock pursues this course of action, I will have no choice but to resign my position as non-credit ESL professor in protest and disgust at Hancock’s bringing segregation and medical apartheid back into our state/country & onto our campus in direct violation of the Mission Statement & Non-Discrimination Statement.

The detailed, longer length reasons are as follow:

It is unfathomable and downright despicable that Hancock College is forcing faculty, staff, AND students to choose between their occupations, livelihoods and getting an education so as to improve one’s situation in life and getting an unwanted, questionably effective, and ultimately unknown experimental medication with unknown long and short term effects that doesn’t even do what its proponents have promised it would do.

Most importantly, this mandate is in direct violation of Hancock’s Mission Statement and Non-Discrimination Statement, which both state:

Allan Hancock College fosters an educational culture that values equity and diversity and engages students in an inclusive learning environment. We will work to build inclusive communities that promote trust and social justice. Allan Hancock College is committed to equity and diversity by ensuring our actions are based on an awareness of the social and historical context of inclusionary practices. We will provide an educational culture that values, nurtures, connects, and engages students. The Allan Hancock Joint Community College District (“District”) is committed to equal opportunity in employment and all access to institutional programs and activities. The District, and each individual who represents the District, shall provide access to its employment opportunities, services, classes, and programs without regard to national origin, religion, age, sex or gender, gender identity, gender expression, race, color, *medical condition*, genetic information, ancestry, sexual orientation, marital status, physical or mental disability, or military and veteran status of any person, or because he or she is perceived to have one or more of the foregoing characteristics, or based on association with a person or group with one or more of these actual or perceived characteristics.1

Secondly, it utterly irrational. The so-called vaccine doesn’t prevent the spread of COVID or its variants, and thus does not eradicate or protect anyone or anything. It merely mitigates the symptoms of the receiver of the original COVID virus, which means it is utterly illogical and thus highly inappropriate to coerce it on those who have decided for their own private reasons that they do not wish to risk it’s unknown effects in getting it when they themselves are at low risk of the virus affecting them in any way. These are not my words, but the words of the CDC director herself.2

So if it doesn’t prevent the spread of the original strain nor its variants, even from those ho received it, and thus doesn’t eradicate anything, but only mitigates symptoms for those who have received it, where is the benefit & logicality of mandating it on those who do not want it? From the very beginning, the responses should have been you get your vaccine, wear your mask, or stay at home, away from others if you are worried about getting it and if you are in the at risk population (75+ years of age / immunocompromised / obese, etc.), leaving the rest of us be to decide what is best for our lives as we alone can know.

I have suffered from OCD and germaphobia my entire life as I have struggled with Tourette Syndrome and its host of co-morbidities like OCD, Anxiety, and Depression. So I get the fear people have of a virus in taking precautions to mitigate the chance that they get it and if they do, they self isolate. I have plenty of coping mechanisms for myself in place of OCD issues, but I would NEVER be in favor of forcing MY means of coping with MY issues on everyone else, especially under threat of their job and their pursuit of happiness through education. We are all individuals who have the individual, inalienable right to determine what is best for us, including what we decide to put on or in our bodies, even within society. No one else but ourselves can know what is best for us as individuals, and thus NO ONE has the right nor just authority to compel us to action or prevent us from action inasmuch as no one’s equal rights are being violated.

1 https://www.hancockcollege.edu/about/mission.php 2 http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/08/06/

cdc_director_vaccines_no_longer_prevent_you_from_spreading_covid.html?jwsource=cl

Sickness, pathogens, bacteria, and illness are a part of life and cannot be eradicated, try as hard as arrogant humanity might. This was never an issue with the flu (which is more deadly to a higher percentage of the population) or any other virus or pathogen/ illness until now, and it was never before claimed that people have a right to forcefully remove others from equal participation in society just because they may or may not have an illness. I know this because I have lived through all sorts of epidemics, pandemics, and hyped up threats of incoming virus, such as Bird Flu, Swine Flu, Mad Cow, Zika Virus, Hantavirus, West Nile Virus, etc. Never once were any of the actions taken against COVID ever considered by the bulk of society. We all just individually took the precautions against them all and went on with life. From the very beginning, the response should have been the same as the past: “you do what you feel is necessary for you but leave everyone else be the do the same for themselves.” Instead it’s turned into the blind leading the blind, developing into the tyranny olympics to see who can be more draconian and dictatorial in the arrogant and vain attempt to achieve the impossible in completely eradicating a variant of the Corona virus that has been with humanity for all recorded history, if not before so. They’d have more success in attempting to alter the moon’s orbit around the earth by blowing at it with their mouths.

Few will be convinced to get this so-called vaccine in threatening their jobs and

chances at education; rather forcing such a “choice” on them convinces them further not to get it because it shows them something is off with it if authorities and those controlled by them are resorting to coercion and threats. A truly beneficial medicine would be welcomed with gladness and voluntary taking once its effects have been seen, not requiring coercion and threats to force it upon people. No health professional EVER convinced a patient to pursue a therapeutic course by threatening coercive action against them if they refused. They wouldn’t be a healthcare provider for long if they did. That the CDC, CA state government and possibly the federal government are all willing to resort to threats and coercion should give sane and rational people cause for great concern. And all of this for a virus that is literally, as per case number data, less dangerous to a larger percentage of the population than the yearly flu, and which has a 97-98% survival rate even for the most at risk target population, with entirely effective therapeutic treatments for even the most at risk individuals, i.e. vitamin D, Ivermectin, HCQ, zinc, etc, and which promises much more robust immunity than the so-called vaccine.

The CDC has botched the COVID response from the very beginning, pushing and relying upon a series of untried and unproven (unscientific) centralized non- pharmaceutical means of starving the virus into eradication, none of which ave been remotely successful in that goal, but all of which have caused great damage to many aspects of life. People have died and will continue to die as a result of their centralized, mismanagement in bringing people’s businesses, their other health concerns, and the world trade economy to a stand still. People’s businesses and education are literally their lives; kill or suppress one and you kill or suppress the other. The CDC literally has blood on its hands and are thus not fit to give guidance on anything to anyone and have thus lost all credibility and authority. They are experts on nothing but how to destroy the

world in less than a year.

I am not a medical professional & thus I must rely on the expertise of those who are. There are many who have been saying for the past 1.5 years that what is happening is not only immoral & illegal, but more importantly, utterly devoid of evidence or rationality to support its imposition on the mass population. They have shown, despite the governments’ and media’s best attempts to shut them up and shut them down, that lockdowns and mask/vaccine mandates are not backed by any scientifically gained and interpreted evidence of effectiveness. The scientific method requires a free speech environment in which evidentiary debate can occur so that the best knowledge and best practices can be discovered and put forward to the scientific community and the non scientific community alike. They were silenced for giving their professional opinion because it dissented from the authorities’ narrative. We should have been following and should now be following the guidance from the health professionals who put out the Great Barrington Declaration, who were silenced by a coalition of the federal government and big tech companies like Facebook, Youtube, Google, and Twitter working together to stifle any form of dissent from their chosen narrative.3 All three of the primary signatories of the GBD, extremely well credentialed with decades of expertise on virological issues at prestigious, well known academic and medical institutions are continually speaking out against the vaccine and mask mandates. You would do well to consider what they have to say on the subjects; they routinely post articles on Twitter and other forms of social media, where they haven’t been banned yet for dissent, for the non-health professional masses to see for themselves and learn from.4 Even the inventor of the mRNA vaccine used in these injections has come out against vaccine mandates.5

The following functional family medical doctor, who has successfully treated 15 COVID patients with purely therapeutic means, keeping them from having to set foot in a hospital, explains how not only is the idea of vaccine and mask mandates immoral but downright dangerous, contrary to our knowledge of viruses, and also completely useless and illogical.6

3 https://gbdeclaration.org/
4 https://twitter.com/MartinKulldorff

https://www.theepochtimes.com/harvard-epidemiologist-martin-kulldorff-on-vaccine- passports-the-delta-variant-and-the-covid-public-health-fiasco_3942556.html

5 https://twitter.com/RWMaloneMD

6 https://www.bitchute.com/video/Uvo0ZclKxMMa/? fbclid=IwAR23xMpOX8L7gqL1eoHddAtz0mJRmm87-56Fgqb3qvxS5hxne7x3aPKDDYI

There has been absolutely no scientific evidence supporting the effectiveness of masking in stopping the spread of respiratory viruses like COVID; rather, there has been study after study showing they, along with distancing, are utterly ineffective in preventing the transmission of the virus. Perhaps those studies are flawed; I don’t know. But the state and the many national case charts from this past 1.5 years have provided us with a randomized study to show that they have done absolutely nothing to stop the spread of transmission and infection in states that mandated them and had high compliance and in states that had no mandates and/or low compliance.7

Additionally, masking seriously inhibits the effectiveness of my successfully teaching and students successfully learning in a language acquisition class in which students’ ability to speak, listen, and thus learn is drastically inhibited by said masks preventing them from being heard and understanding others. So much of our communication via language also comes from non-verbal cues, such as facial expression and lip movements, which are unreadable with a mask covering half the face. We’d be doing a great disservice to our ESL students in forcing them to learn a language without them being able to have all the means of communication at their disposal. We may as well teach them write without knowledge of the alphabet. Our student population, the Hispanic migrant workers already have enough difficulty as it is in gaining the emotional and psychological confidence to use and practice their English without a mask in class; adding a forced mask will literally be a muzzle for many of them, shutting down any chances they may have had in gaining that confidence because they won’t be heard and understood, nor understand others and thus their confidence will go down as they constantly have to repeat themselves or ask others to repeat themselves. It’s hard enough understanding native English speakers as a native/L! English speaker through masks. Multiply that difficulty by 10 and that’s what it will be like for our students.

Those are the scientific, logic focused argument against the school’s vaccine and mask mandate. There’s also a whole host of MORAL issues with it as well.

This woman, who has a personal history with racial discrimination as an African American woman who grew up in the Jim Crow South explained the immorality behind such vaccine and mask mandates, equating them to 20th century Jim Crow laws and

7 https://tomwoods.com/covid/#

https://tomwoods.lpages.co/covid-charts-cnn-forgot/

https://www.covidchartsquiz.com/masks

https://rationalground.com/letter-to-the-school-board/ (see section titled “Mask Mandates— especially in schools—do not impact school or community transmission.”

https://movementum.co.uk/journal/masks

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.18.21257385v1.full

practices of 20th century America.8 I can personally attest to this, having spent the past year and half being dehumanized by being made to be served outside for not being able to wear a mask, as already explained, separated and kept apart from the rest of society despite having not been sick once since Feb. 2020, which I highly suspect was COVID; and if so, it would thus render me immune & thus of no threat. This will only continue further if the vaccine AND masks mandates continue.

Furthermore, there is evidence showing that ethnic minorities make up the bulk of the unvaccinated population, and thus a vaccine mandate would be racially discriminatory against said ethnic minorities:

Overall, across these 40 states, the percent of White people who have received at l e a s t o n e COVID-19 vaccine dose (49%) was roughly 1.3 times higher than the rate for Black people (38%) and 1.1 times higher than the rate for Hispanic people (43%) as of August 2, 2021. 9

People have their reasons for not getting this “vaccine,” and ultimately it’s no one’s business but their own why they choose to get it or not get it. You will thus be unintentionally targeting our migrant and other ethnic minority community that predominates at the school, illogically and inappropriately holding a coerced choice of a rushed, unknown experimental injection or their education/jobs above their heads. This is systemic racism in practice. No amount of state or federal funding is worth selling our souls for 30 pieces of silver and setting a VERY dangerous precedent that will continually allow the state/feds to coerce us into doing their will by dangling stolen money over our heads, including forcing God knows what into our bodies against our will. This is just as much a morality issue concerning the freedom and rights of future generations, our students and our children as it about science and logic. What kind of parents, grandparents, and older siblings are we if we hand over our children and younger siblings to an all powerful centralized authority that can withold their development and lives, their pursuit of happiness, unless they obey that authority’s every command and dictate? Is there anything more definitive of slavery than that?

Now is the time to take a stand and say NO, take the consequences, and find our own fairer, equal, inclusive, and freedom/rights protecting way of continuing forward. And if that means pay cuts in the short term, then so be it. If it means I am forced to resign, then so be it. Humanity always finds a way to survive and life always rewards us for our choices, according to the degree of their integrity. Our founding forefathers and foremothers, for all the very real faults, imperfections, and sins, took the right course against all odds in a much harsher world than we live in, and succeeded through perseverance and grit, the same qualities we teach our students to have; if they can do it, so can we. The state and feds only have as much power over us as we give them through compliance and/or division and fighting over silly things that mean nothing at the end of the day. We have the rare opportunity to stand together and potentially save

8

9 https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/latest-data-on-covid-19-vaccinations- race-ethnicity/

our future generations AND ourselves from an evil, tyrannical precedent that will most assuredly be abused further and further in the future, regardless of who has the reins of government; there’s nothing more permanent than a temporary government program or policy. We have the opportunity to be the lone voice of resistance in protection of the liberty and rights of the individual, EACH individual, YOU, ME, HIM, HER, THEM, US, etc, our colleagues and our students. Standing up and saying “NO” now may have slim odds of accomplishing much, but there’s at least a small chance. Whereas, if we don’t take that stand and capitulate like we did after 9/11, there is no chance of making things different and all is lost, the precedent is set, and it will be used further and further to test just how much more we will take of them taking our humanity away.

One cannot consistently say “my body, my choice” and claim inclusivity in the classroom while standing behind coerced vaccination or just standing by and doing nothing while the unvaccinated and unmasked are made into the unclean “other” responsible for the misery of our community/state/nation, justifying further harmful action against them. Such happened to my Mormon ancestors as they were violently driven out of their homes in the middle of winter for their LDS religious beliefs; it happened to my Hungarian relatives who were forced to live under terrible communist rule for half of the 20th century. It happened in our own state to Japanese-Americans during WWII. It happened to the Jews during the Spanish Inquisition and under Nazi and Soviet rule. It happened to African Americans (even in CA) and South Africans under state sponsored and imposed apartheid. If you oppose any of these abhorrent historical incidents of mass genocide and inhumane, discriminatory “othering” treatment, and see them as I do as despicable injustice and tyranny, you must also oppose the systemic imposition of a medical caste/apartheid system in your work environment, community, county, state, and country that could very well lead to further, more harmful and sickening escalations like in the very recent past. History's genocides were not accomplished in one day; they took years of constant propaganda barrages, small legit power grabs, altering the rules, laws, and governmental system, and slow, transformations over time with crises taken advantage of or created to propose or actually commit violent rights violating actions that play on people’s darkest fears and emotions to get them to either turn against their innocent neighbors and family members or turn their backs on them and close their eyes and ears to their plight.

If Hancock College chooses this wrong, harmful, and illogical, unscientific course of proceeding with this vaccine and mask mandate, then I will have no choice than to resign my position as a non-credit ESL professor (a position I’ve held in good faith the past 5 years) in protest and disgust, effective immediately. I will not have any connection whatsoever to an organization that seeks to bring segregation and apartheid back into the US in full violation of constitutional and state law as well as common reason, human decency, and rationality. I have legit medical reasons that would exempt me from both mandates. But this goes well beyond me; this is also about my fellow colleagues and my students who are, like me, being strong armed into something they do not want nor possibly need (if already immune) by government imposed mafia tactics. I couldn’t live with myself if I did not stand up for them, too. I won’t sit back and watch my very colleagues and neighbors recommit or make more possible the atrocities of the past on

those society has targeted as scapegoats out of fear, propaganda, and bunk “science.” Nor will I take any part in it.

Thus, the decision is yours: abandon your vaccine and mask mandate decision or lose a perfectly good, effective, well credentialed, and very well liked ESL teacher who has gone above and beyond what is required of me to help my students achieve their goals and dreams. And who knows, perhaps other faculty, maybe even students might see my example and follow suit realizing what you are doing is wrong and harmful, in which case you may have a lack of personnel crisis in addition to a lack of student crisis come fall semester. Or I may stand alone. Either way, my conscience will be clear whatever the consequences may be, for I believe in doing what is right and letting the consequences follow.

I apologize for the length, but I know of no other way to communicate this respectfully. I anxiously hope for all our sakes you reverse course on this disastrous, illogical, and immoral mandate decision and inclusively welcome all back equally to work and classes “without regard to medical condition,” as per Hancock’s Mission Statement and Non-Discrimination Statement.