Though North Carolina’s “door-to-door” vaccine outreach program has been called “not confrontational,” a health advocacy group said it veers into violating a “zone of privacy.”
The zone of privacy is civil liberty constitutionally protected in the Bill of Rights first recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) when it determined that the government can’t restrict the sale and use of contraceptives, invalidating an 1879 law that the court ruled was a violation of “marital privacy.”
The court’s ruling later became a precedent in the 1973 case of Roe V. Wade, which decided that the government can’t excessively restrict a woman’s right to have an abortion.
Leslie Manookian, president and founder of the Health Freedom Defense Fund Inc, (HFDF), a nonprofit headquartered in Sandpoint, Idaho, told The Epoch Times that the established zone of privacy is being challenged by the door-to-door campaign.
“We don’t walk up to people and ask them, are you on anti-depressants? Do you have erectile dysfunction? We don’t ask people personal things like this for a reason, because it’s unethical, and because of this zone of privacy,” Manookian said. “We understand that it’s not our business to meddle in other people’s businesses, and it’s not the government’s business, either.”
Mecklenburg County Public Health Department (MCPHD) in Charlotte, North Carolina initiated a “doses-to-doors” vaccine campaign that is followed by a mobile clinic to administer shots to those swayed.
The health department’s program, which began last week, is a part of a larger campaign spoken about in a speech on July 6 when President Joe Biden said there needed to be a movement to visit each community, neighborhood, and “oftentimes door-to-door—literally knocking on doors—to help the remaining people” who aren’t vaccinated.
Though North Carolina followed suit, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster challenged Biden’s door-to-door vaccine campaign by directing the state health board to prohibit the operation.
In a July 9 letter addressed to Mark Elam, chairman of the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC), McMaster said the decision to get vaccinated is a personal one.
In his July 6 speech, Biden didn’t specify who would be going door-to-door, though in a July 9 press briefing by Press Secretary Jen Psaki, she said campaigners wouldn’t be federal employees but “grassroots volunteers” such as “members of the clergy” who would be providing information on vaccines.
In response to a reporter requesting that Psaki address McMaster’s resistance to the door-to-door campaign, Psaki said, “Well, let me first say that the failure to provide accurate public health information, including the efficacy of vaccines and the accessibility of them to people across the country, including South Carolina, is literally killing people, so maybe they should consider that.”
This is an excerpt from The Epoch Times.
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