Democrat New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has a warm, traditional Thanksgiving message for his subjects and anyone with the temerity to visit them:
It’s that King Cuomo can control how you freely associate with family and friends.
As Dean Balsamini explains for the New York Post (Shh! Don't tell Twitter!), despite Cuomo telling residents of the Empire State that they are free to travel to other homes for Thanksgiving (thank you, gracious master), they aren’t really free to do that at all if those homes happen to be out of state. Upon setting foot in New York, they, and any “visitors” from out of state, will be ordered to show negative COVID19 tests and quarantine for three days - even when the tests are negative.
But wait, there’s more!
Now, travelers must show proof of a negative test taken within three days of arriving in the Empire State, and must also quarantine for three more days — and get a new COVID-19 test on the fourth.
How nice. And that’s not all!
If that’s positive, they must isolate for two weeks, the governor said at an Albany press briefing.
If you act fast, you too can experience the additional pressure of Cuomo’s well-shone shoe pressing on your rights. All you need do is refuse any test. At that point, you get fourteen days of house-arrest.
Anyone who refuses to be tested must quarantine for 14 days.
And don’t get cocky, you reckless New Yorkers. You’d better understand that you travel thanks to the beneficence of Don Cuomo. You might think you can find some way around this, but you must kiss the proverbial ring.
New Yorkers who return home within a day of leaving must take a test within four days of their arrival, Cuomo said. But if they are gone longer for 24 hours, then the new rules apply.
And to put on bold display how nonsensical, arbitrary, and authoritarian Cuomo’s “commands” are, consider how this position compares to his “rule” on out-of-state commuters.
Those who commute to New York between bordering states are not required to be tested each trip, he noted.
Sooo, if you flip out of state and back every day for a week, Cuomo knows that the Virus (capital V) leaves you alone. But if you stay out there in the badlands for more than a day, the Virus will get you – and infect the entire state.
Makes perfect sense, and, of course, his order is so… peaceful and constitutional.
By the way, on the practical level? Cuomo exempts travel from New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania, which, on the latest October 31 chart from Johns Hopkins, means he is allowing visitors from the state with the highest death rate per capita (NJ), the fourth-worst rate (CT) and one that hovers just outside the top 10 worst (PA).
But, by now, who would expect Cuomo to make sense or abide by his oath to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution and the New York State Constitution?
To do so would be like expecting his brother to actually engage in fair-minded journalism on CNN.
After all, this is the man who, at the start of October, literally threatened Jewish schools and synagogues, zip code by zip code, telling their leaders that if they did not abide by his mask, time, and capacity commands, he would shut them down.
If the religious leaders do not agree to abide by these rules, then we will close the religious institutions, period.
That doesn’t exactly comport with the First Amendment’s protection of religion and free association. It also acts as a form of taking by the government, which, according to that crazy thing THE CONSTITUTION requires “just compensation” from Herr Cuomo’s administration. It’s punishment without a jury trial, which is forbidden by the Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendments, and it is cruel and unusual punishment, forbidden by the Eighth. Additionally, for the private schools, it is an infringement of the Contract Clause of the Constitution, which forbids state governments from interfering with the fulfillment of already-existing contracts between private parties, and Cuomo’s demand for test results is an infringement of the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits state searches of individuals or their property without warrants issued by judges citing the person to be searched and the item or items sought.
And, finally, there’s the practical question of whether the tests are reliable. If the tests are PCR (polymerase chain reaction), then that answer is, “NO! They are not reliable as diagnostic tests!”
As Torsten Englebrecht and Konstantin Demeter note, Dr. Kary Mullis, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who created the PCR, warned people not to use it as a diagnostic test.
The reason is because the PCR takes RNA nucleotides and reproduces them. That requires specific isolation of viral RNA, and, according to Englebrecht and Demeter, this has not been done for Wuhan SARS COV19.
As they note:
In the ‘CDC 2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel’ file from March 30, 2020, for example, it says:
‘Detection of viral RNA may not indicate the presence of infectious virus or that 2019-nCoV is the causative agent for clinical symptoms”
And:
‘This test cannot rule out diseases caused by other bacterial or viral pathogens.’
The RNA they have could be other coronavirus RNA, and the more a tester cycles the reproduction, the higher the number of targeted nucleotides. This leads to very high false positives, as the authors observe.
And the new “rapid” tests? They aren’t quantitative, which is very important to those who are trying to estimate the viral load that is a leading indicator of communicability.
Moreover, in the product descriptions of the RT-qPCR tests for SARS-COV-2 it says they are “qualitative” tests, contrary to the fact that the ‘q’ in ‘qPCR’ stands for ‘quantitative.’ And if these tests are not ‘quantitative’ tests, they don’t show how many viral particles are in the body.
So Cuomo is forcing taxpayers to pay for an arbitrarily-applied set of mandates in a police state that enforces unreliable tests for a disease the fatality rate of which is roughly equal to the seasonal flu, and, as he does it, he treats his oath to the US and NY constitutions like poker bluffs.
Is it any wonder many New Yorkers are fed-up with him?
(Cover Photo: Bob Jagendorf)