The line our society must draw is at protecting citizens from medical coercion in order to conduct business. Some might worry this would constitute a mandate on businesses, but it isn’t. Mandates compel action.

States and private firms that demand vaccination are the ones leveling mandates: businesses like a lobbying firm in DC that has informed a mother who intends to have more children soon that she must get a new, emergency vaccine with unknown affects on fertility and pregnancy if she would like to travel — and thereby succeed — at the company. //

On the other hand, denying activity that strips choice and dehumanizes citizens and families fits neatly into traditional conservative governance. “You may not compel abortion,” “you may not marry a child,” “you may not have multiple spouses” — these are bans based on traditional values we can confidently defend. “You may not mandate a novel injection for customers to engage in commerce” fits cleanly into this tradition. //

Government-corporate databases are both a dream for hackers and a quick path to a social credit system, and the only way to retard that kind of power is to make medical mandates a terrible burden to the states and businesses that demand them. The way to do this is a patchwork of states that resist by banning them. Do corporations want to do business in states like Texas, Florida, and Montana? Do airlines want to maintain hubs in states that say no? Are companies willing to write off that much market share?

This patchwork of resistance will also bring on reluctant allies who otherwise would happily join the new regime. //

“I don’t care if Google is a private company because it has too much power,” J.D. Vance, bestselling author of “Hillbilly Elegy” and a possible 2022 Ohio candidate for senator, told Fox News’s Tucker Carlson on his podcast. “And if you want to have a country where people can live their lives freely you have to be concerned about power, whether it’s concentrated in the government or concentrated in big corporations.”

Vance is right. While the past year has revealed that a depressing number of Americans will yield to arbitrary power wielded in the name of COVID-19, and will surely submit to both novel medical procedures and invasive private databases just for a chance to return to normalcy, moral governance ought to protect them from being coerced into that choice at all — and should protect those who still refuse from being treated as second-class citizens. //

To stop COVID vaccine passports, legislators concerned must target the databases. The databases are going to have to be digital to make sense, for speed, for efficiency, and because people will otherwise forge paperwork. The only effective way to go after them will be to prohibit any sort of digital database that collects or distributes personal medical data, and to make it a crime for organizations not covered by HIPAA to make services conditional on a customer granting access to medical data.

Organizations that are covered by HIPAA include doctors, clinics, pharmacies, nursing homes, and health-care plans, among others. If a business is not among those then it is not allowed to ask for access to your medical records. This will both protect privacy and prevent medical coercion, and when added to executive orders like those in Florida and Texas, will deal a death blow to the plan to force the COVID regime of the past year onto American citizens for years and decades to come.