“The Issue Is”: Student vaccine mandates, grading President Biden, and the NFC Championship
LOS ANGELES - The announced retirement of a California-born Supreme Court Justice, a proposed vaccine mandate for all California students who want to attend class in-person, and let’s not forget a Rams-49ers meeting in the NFC Championship… It's been another busy week in California.
To break it all down, and then some, Elex Michaelson is joined on "The Issue Is" by Progressive Attorney Ethan Bearman, Conservative host Michael Knowles, and sports journalist Arash Markazi.
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THE ISSUE IS: MANDATING THE COVID VACCINE FOR ALL CALIFORNIA STUDENTS
KNOWLES’ CENTRAL TAKE: "They don't stop the spread. They don't stop infection. We know that the infection fatality rate for kids from all forms of COVID, and especially from this most mild form, the Omicron variant, is extremely low - you're looking at about 400 deaths of kids under 18 per year since the pandemic began. And when you factor in severe comorbidities, it's probably significantly lower than that. That is much less than deaths from cancer. That's much less than deaths, among children, from heart disease. It's about on par with the flu and with pneumonia, so it doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense. Plus, there are some genuine concerns here. Belgium, for instance, just stopped recommending the Moderna vaccine for people under 31, to say nothing of kids who are much, much younger, because of fears of myocarditis, side effects, there are other side effects as well, including nerve damage and other things. So it just seems to me to be a solution that will not solve the problem that it is supposed to solve, and could cause a lot of other problems as well…"
BEARMAN’S CENTRAL TAKE: "We already require vaccines for children to attend school for things like polio, MMR, DTaP. There are so many vaccines that are already required, this is par for the course to protect our children in the community, and it's important to note the science is overwhelmingly in favor of taking a multi-layered approach… As long as there is still medical exemptions allowed, then I think that that's the right move for community protection, because I don't want my child coming home and transmitting it to my grandparent and then them passing away. It's just called basic safety and precaution because we live in a community…."
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THE ISSUE IS: GRADING PRESIDENT BIDEN’S FIRST YEAR IN OFFICE
BEARMAN’S CENTRAL TAKE: "I would give him a B+, and I would give that because he got infrastructure passed, he reduced childhood poverty by roughly one-third in the United States. We have record GDP growth, record number of jobs added. We have unemployment under 4%. We have alliances back in line, globally, with our traditional allies. We have progress happening regarding climate change. And he's been working on restoring the federal courts with good judicial picks. So I think he's a B+, and I think there's a lot of positives that I think the media likes to not focus on…"
KNOWLES’ CENTRAL TAKE: "I would give him a D. The reason I don't give him an F is because he has not yet plunged us into a massive war, though it appears that he might be able to do that as we look at the crisis in Ukraine… There was the disaster in Afghanistan, which was largely his fault because of the timetables that he insisted on, because of his refusal to hold the Bagram Air Base before he evacuated the rest of the country. He didn't evacuate the rest of the country. He left a lot of Americans behind… There is the border. This is the absolute worst year for illegal border crossings in at least 20 years, if not ever. Those aren't my words. Those were the words that were caught on tape of Joe Biden's Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas…. Inflation is at a 40-year high. Biden doesn't own that entire problem, but he does own a lot of it because of his policies on energy, on easy money and on the lockdown - the mandates creating a labor shortage, which of course, is going to send prices going up. And then there's his admitted failures on COVID - that was the one issue that Joe Biden had been above water on and that the people still supported him on, and he's flopped on that, too. Joe Biden began his presidency by saying, I'm going to shut down the virus. What did he say just a few weeks ago? There is no federal solution. He's admitting that Trump was actually right…"
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THE ISSUE IS: THE NFC CHAMPIONSHIP GAME BETWEEN THE RAMS AND 49ERS
MARKAZI’S CENTRAL TAKE: "No one who is below the age of 40 grew up a Los Angeles Rams fan. The Rams were in St. Louis for 21 years, and the price you have to pay for that, you do not have diehard hardcore fans that will be paying a $1,000 for a ticket. That is not something that's possible. That's not going to happen... So unfortunately, you will have more 49er fans there Sunday then Los Angeles Rams fans….
"I think The Rams [win]. I totally get it, they've lost six straight times, they've been swept the last three seasons, they lost the last game of the season... The Rams are the better team, the Rams are the superior team. This is the only game that matters. No one cares about the last six games. If they win it on Sunday, all the work that they did, they went all in to go to the Super Bowl this year…"
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THE ISSUE IS: THE VALUE OF SPORTS
MARKAZI’S CENTRAL TAKE: "Sports has always been the escape for us. No matter what we're going through in life, we have sports. That's why at the beginning of the pandemic it was so hard, because we didn't even have sports, and then when we got sports back, we got sports back without fans, and we truly appreciated how much the fans meant... Sports gives us that time away from the real world, where we don't have to worry about what we're going through with our life, with our job. We want to watch football…"
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The Issue Is: with Elex Michaelson is California's only statewide political show. For showtimes and more information, go to TheIssueIsShow.com.