Candidate Survey 2026: Did you oppose the COVID 19 vaccine mandate?

Equally important, government should never suppress competing scientific or medical viewpoints. Open debate is essential to sound policy and public trust. Silencing dissent breeds suspicion and undermines confidence that decisions are truly being made for the public’s benefit. As Benjamin Franklin famously warned, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” Our Constitution was designed to protect liberty precisely when fear makes it most vulnerable.

Break yourself from the duopoly. Get off the Jones Plantation!

I can appreciate and understand the concerns about civil liberties. I believed mandates needed to be narrowly tailored and legally sound. Public trust matters. Durable public health policy requires transparency and accountability.

As a soldier, I experienced these mandates firsthand. Service members volunteered to defend this country, yet many were pressured to choose between complying with a government mandate or risking their military careers.

To use a simple analogy: if a neighbor’s house is on fire, the community does not pause to debate individual preferences—everyone grabs a bucket because the fire threatens the entire street. As a 22-year Navy veteran, I understand that the survival of the ‘crew’ depends on everyone fulfilling their duty to the whole. My ‘Blueprint for Socioeconomic Evolution’ views public health as vital social infrastructure. When we face a crisis, we should not focus on the ‘differences’ in our private medical choices, but on our ‘commonality’ as citizens who must act together to protect our national readiness and the ‘General Will.”

They were coercive government overreach that violated individual bodily autonomy and the right to informed consent. No one should be forced, under threat of losing their job, education, or livelihood, to inject a medical product they did not want, especially when early data showed the vaccines did not stop transmission, had limited long-term safety data, and carried real risks for certain age groups and healthy individuals. Mandates ignored natural immunity, treated healthy people as threats, and created a two-tier society based on compliance rather than science. Public health policy should never override personal medical decisions or turn employers and schools into enforcement arms of the state. I supported voluntary choice, early treatment options, and protection for the vulnerable without punishing everyone else.

George Washington actually mandated a vaccination in the Continental Army: “Necessity not only authorizes but seems to require the measure, for should the disorder infect the Army in the natural way and rage with its usual virulence we should have more to dread from it than from the Sword of the Enemy.”