It does appear that one of the most political government organizations in the state of South Carolina at least now has their ear to the ground and realizes that this would likely have not gone over well with the people if they tried to require the shot for kids to attend school.
If you’re reading this as an out-of-stater considering moving to the Greenville area, SC DHEC was absolutely Covid-crazy over the past couple of years. So it’s a relief to know we don’t have to fight this battle at this point for this current school year. No Covid-19 vaccine required for kids to attend school.
Companies continue to press ahead with the vaccine mandates. There are three big medical systems here in the Upstate…Prisma, Bon Secours and Spartanburg Regional. I’ve been hearing different things about what each is requiring of their employees when it comes to vaccine mandates. From what I’ve heard Spartanburg Regional has been giving exemptions. I believe Prisma’s mandate is temporarily on hold for now. However, “Catholic” Bon Secours is pressing on despite the judicial injunctions temporarily halting Biden’s vaccine mandate. How liberal they will be with exemptions is still to be seen. As I talk with people who work at big companies in general, they are not stopping despite recent court injuctions.
This e-mail that was purportedly sent to Bon Secours employees today. Note the elusive and mysterious “ministry” leadership. It seems to be a nice way to deflect from any one particular person being held responsible for this decision. Maybe all the employees know who the “ministry” leadership is but that would be great to know and see a public link to remind them who made this judgement call on the vaccine mandate. Does Bon Secours consider their multi-billion business a ministry? 🙂 I suppose. Seems like a stretch to me. But whatever…they are pushing ahead with the vaccine…maybe it’s what Jesus would want them to do. I don’t know.
People are not happy about this. I realize some of you reading this might be cheering this news on that health care companies are forcing all their employees to get vaccinated. This is not going over well here in South Carolina where there still runs a spirit of freedom and independence. My hope is that the stories about vaccine injuries and deaths are exaggerated and don’t continue to happen. If problems continue, apparently Pfizer, JNJ and Moderna cannot be held liable, but what about these companies pushing their employees to be vaccinated? Might they be held liable? The executives? The boards of directors? Only time will tell.
Yesterday people from all over the Upstate came to protest in front of the entrance to one of GE’s manufacturing facilities in Greenville, SC. In the crowd were some GE employees as well who wanted to make a statement about the newly issued vaccine mandate by the company.
The event took place at about 11am on Thursday, October 21st. I was there and would say the crowd was likely at least 150 people. What was most pronounced at this particular rally or protest were the number of blue collar men who showed up to express their concerns the the overbearing and frankly Un-American demands being made by President Joe Biden and companies like General Electric. One of the groups that has been involved in leading these protests or medical freedom rallies around Greenville is the Greenville County GOP. GC GOP Chairman, Jeff Davis, issued this statement concerning the vaccine mandate by GE.
My understanding from talking with people I know at GE is that the company is handing out both medical and religious exemptions. It doesn’t sound like they are difficult to get and the company is not stringing people along on making the decision whether someone is exempt or not. I did hear that with the medical exemption that the company is requiring a signature from a doctor. Good luck with that. There aren’t many doctors in the country I suspect willing to put their names on something like this. Given the way the country is going, they might be placed on a new enemies list. Here’s WYFF’s story. Note the overhead picture is when the crown had died down a bit so it doesn’t look like many people.
It’s been quite a battle over masks the past several months here in South Carolina. I won’t go in to all the details but the main reason elementary and secondary school children are not masked is because there was a stipulation put in to the budget for this year that stated schools could not mandate masks.
As you could expect, they have been trying to work around it. The Department of Education has been and continues to be huge proponents of masking our children. They forced the issue with transportation requiring all students be masked. Now an Obama judge, Mary Geiger Lewis, who happens to be a Clemson grad and a Univ. of South Carolina law student, sided with the parents of immunocompromised children in a suit they brought forward with the help of the ACLU. By siding with these children, this opens the door to mask mandates being forced on several hundred thousand school children across the state. Greenville County Schools alone has more than 70,000 students. State Superintendent of Schools, Molly Spearman, is wasting no time telling schools that they MUST revise their mask policies if they had relied upon the excuse to not mask due to SC law since that law has been stuck down. They must come up with another reason why they aren’t requiring masks because they are out of line with the CDC which means they are out of line with SC DHEC and the expectations from the Department of Education….all this means is that we will likely see a lot of mask mandates in short order for our students.
I don’t have the details but I believe Attorney General Alan Wilson is challenging this ruling as might be a few of our state representatives. Here’s the memo Spearman sent to all school districts yesterday.
Meanwhile, it’s Wednesday afternoon and I fully expect we’ll have some school districts issuing mask mandates before the weekend.
This broke last month but thought I would post it here for the record given all the craziness we are seeing coming from the government trying to incentivize people to get the Covid-19 vaccine. This is the first I’ve seen this done in the schools. Anderson School District 5’s $100 Covid-19 vaccine incentive has received a lot of attention from this as you can imagine. Anderson County is one of the counties here in the Upstate. It’s still apparently getting peoples’ attention as I heard it on the radio news yesterday. One of the district administrators was on the air making sure that people realize they are not going direct to the students to get the jab. He said they still need to get parently approval. I don’t know if that’s the law or just them being courteous to not upset the parents. The main thing is they said they want to reward those who go get vaccinated.
I think they’ll have more luck if they start to offer the new iPhone 13 as an incentive. In fact, maybe they could purchase 10 or 20 of them and have a raffle? Why not? Will kids fall for it? I hope not.
Here’s the main site for Anderson School District 5.
For the third Sunday in-a-row there has been a medical freedom rally in downtown Greenville. Three weeks ago about 150 people gathered in Falls Park to express their concerns and raise questions about the vaccine mandates and possible Covid passports. The group grew to about 300-400 people the following Sunday as an event was sponsored by the Greenville County GOP. That same group gather yesterday albeit was a smaller crowd of maybe 200 people or so. These rally’s will continue for the next two Sundays. I’d encourage all to show up. We need more people!
My wife and I have attended these with our two teenage sons. It’s been great to meet new people who are willing to express and demonstrate their concern about some of the increasingly tyrranical moves made by government. So far in South Carolina we have not had to deal with the heavy hand of the Governor or the legislature in demanding vaccine mandates or Covid passports. I have not heard much yet as far as businesses requiring the vaccine for their employees. We have seen that both Prisma and Bon Secours will be requiring their employees to get vaxxed after President Biden announced his mandates last week.
As I have talked with others who work at big companies, the consensus right now seems to be that the employers are highly encouraging their employees to get vaxxed but they are not yet requiring it. Many seem to be waiting until they see the regulation come down from OSHA which it has not yet. It would be nice to see if at least one of these big companies would take on these mandates but pushing back against the Biden Administration and OSHA and sue to get these mandates withdrawn. I have not seen anything yet that would confirm any big company has done this. Now that said, floating around the internet the other day was information that perhaps General Dynamics may have withdrawn their vaccine requirement for their employees. Whether that is a permanent or temporary withdrawal, I do not know but will watch for more information. If this is true, this is in directly conflict with the orders from President Biden especially as they are a defense contractor with more than 100,000 employees. This would be a BIG DEAL.
Join us for our next Medical Freedom Rallies on Sunday, September 26th and October 3rd from 3-5pm at the Peace Center in downtown Greenville, SC.
This is being celebrated all over the South Carolina news this afternoon. I even saw the San Francisco Chronicle of all things had a story about South Carolina achieving this milestone. I suspect they don’t think too highly of us here in the South :)… South Carolina achieves 50% vaccination rate of eligible adults – FINALLY!
It has taken an ENORMOUS effort to push this to 50%. The last 5% or so has taken an extraordinary effort in terms of get out the vax information to people so they will get the shot. The advertising on the radio, TV and social media has been relentless. If you visit SC DHEC’s Facebook page, they must post between 8-10 times per day different stories about Covid and the vaccine. How in the world are they going to get to 70, 80, 90% vaccination rates? Ain’t gonna happen. The only way we get close to 70% I believe is going to require forced vaccinations. I may be new here to South Carolina, but I’m thinking the folks here aren’t going to take too kindly to forced anything…let alone vaccinations. Should be fun!
Richland County, Columbia, SC and the University of South Carolina Gamecocks go ALL IN on the Masks!
Real estate…what’s the phrase? Location, location, location? The Upstate of South Carolina is the most conservative and Republican part of the state of South Carolina. But one would be mistaken if they just assumed that all of South Carolina was inhabited by neanderthal conservatives like you might find in the Greenville, Anderson, Pickens, Laurens, Spartanburg area. Quite the contrary. Exhibit A – Columbia, SC.
Columbia, SC sits in the center geographically of South Carolina and is home of our South Carolina State Capitol. The city is within Richland County. I’m not going to go in to all the nonsense about the City of Columbia and their constant push for mask mandates but the latest coming out of the midlands area is that Richand County just voted in a mask mandate for the next 60 days effective today. It’s a $25 fine if you’re not wearing one….I don’t know if that is $25 per day or per incident that you get caught without wearing one. On top of that, the University of South Carolina Gamecocks also now require a mask mandate for their football games if you can believe that. (The funny thing is they note in that news article that I just linked that the City of Columbia is responsible for enforcing the mandate…will the City deputize many at the stadium to issue citations?) BTW, the fines apparently are different. It’s $100 in the City of Columbia and only $25 in Richland County. At the UofSC football game, they note that the City of Columbia is in charge so it might cost you $100. Note the mask mandate is for the next 30 days for football and I’m sure it will be renewed as they all were every 30-60 days in 2020 across much of the country. Will the people comply? Will they continue to put up with this? Imagine the joy of sitting outside in the hot sun for 3-4 hours watching a football game outside with a mask on. Dumb.
If you’ve been watching any college football this season, you’ve seen images of packed stadiums with 70-80,000 people sitting right next to one another having a great time! You would expect based upon media hysteria 24×7 that there would be massive Covid-19 / Delta outbreaks, thousands and thousands would be seriously ill with many in the hospital on their death beds…and by now, surely many would be dead as a result of their obession with college football. However, we have yet to hear any stories regarding this college football related Covid outbreak. Hmm.
If you’re finding my blog and you are offended about my attitude about the mask and these outrageous mask mandates, please just move on. Anyone implementing a mask mandate today in 2021 neither belongs in elected office nor should they hold their current job/position at their companies or schools that are implementing this ridiculous overreach.
No more mask mandates!