The COVID vaccine mandate fight has reached the Supreme Court, and by Saturday night the argument had spilled into college football. Attorney Steve Joncus, appearing on the Real American Voice program, told viewers that a petition for a writ of certiorari is now before the high court in the case of an Oregon doctor who lost her admittance privileges at Providence hospital after she refused to take the COVID vaccine. The petition, he said, asks the justices to resolve a split in how the informed consent provision of the emergency use authorization statute is treated — pointing out that service members have been allowed to enforce that right while civilians have not.
Joncus laid out the case in a clip circulated by the account @RealAmVoice. The doctor, he said, was, as he put it, the most prolific surgeon in her specialty in the state of Oregon. She later relocated to South Carolina, he said, because she could not practice medicine in Oregon.
He also argued that the Ninth Circuit has held that civilians have no right to sue to enforce the informed consent provision of the EUA statute, the law that allowed the government to issue experimental drugs like the COVID vaccine under emergency authorization. Joncus said the Supreme Court will decide on Monday whether to take the case.
The host of the program described the COVID vaccine mandates in sweeping terms, saying millions of Americans were told to get the shot or lose their jobs, and praised those who refused. He said his own wife took the vaccines after being told she could not work at the hospital otherwise, and he described the federal government's posture toward holdouts as unbending.
“You better hitch your wagon to something else because that dog won't hunt again,” the host said.
Joncus, for his part, called the vaccine mandates, in the clip, “the greatest crime against humanity ever committed,” and said he now has one of those cases in front of the Supreme Court. He did not identify the doctor by name in the exchange.
That segment was posted hours before a separate wave of reaction tied the mandate fight to an entirely different arena — an injury on a football field in Los Angeles.
Oregon quarterback Dante Moore was carted off the field and taken to a hospital Saturday after taking a violent hit from USC linebacker Desman Stephens in the second quarter of the Big Ten matchup. Coverage of the injury described Moore sliding on a scramble before the back of his head hit the ground. The hit by Stephens drew immediate controversy, and a report by the New York Post likewise described Moore as having been sent to a hospital.
By Saturday night, the account @nypost had posted that the USC linebacker had celebrated after the brutal hit sent Moore to the hospital — the kind of post that, on its own, would have stayed inside the sports cycle.
Instead, the two threads interlocked. Accounts carrying the COVID mandate case began pointing to the football injury as a parallel they saw as unmissable: a young player taken off a field on a cart, and a doctor who, in Joncus's telling, was stripped of the right to practice medicine after refusing a vaccine. The @RealAmVoice clip and the @nypost post were circulating on the same feeds within hours of one another, and the terms of one argument were being applied to the other.
The account @nypost reported the hospital trip. The account @RealAmVoice carried the Supreme Court claim and the assessment of the mandate regime. Neither account is responsible for how the other was deployed, but the sequence is what readers encountered: first the field, then the courtroom.
How the doctor's case turns is now a matter for the justices, if they take it. Joncus told viewers the decision on certiorari is set for Monday. The emergency use authorization statute, he said, contains an informed consent provision that civilians cannot — under the Ninth Circuit's reading — sue to enforce. Service members, he said, can. That is the discrepancy he is asking the Supreme Court to resolve.
Next News Network could not independently verify the claims made about the Oregon doctor's case or the status of her petition before the Supreme Court. The account of the hospital privileges dispute and the doctor's move to South Carolina rests on the statements of the attorney representing her, as carried in the interview.
What is clear from the posts and the coverage is that the two stories are now traveling together. The @nypost post about Moore and the @RealAmVoice interview about the doctor occupied the same conservative timelines within a single news cycle, and the argument that began with a hospital in Providence, Oregon is, for the moment, being made in the same breath as a hit in the second quarter at the Coliseum.
Our Take
The left spent four years telling Americans they were selfish for questioning a shot that was never properly explained to them, and now the bill is coming due. A doctor who was the most prolific surgeon in her specialty in Oregon is living in South Carolina because she would not take an experimental product, and the Ninth Circuit told her she has no right to sue over the informed consent provision written into the very law that allowed the shot to be pushed on the public. Service members get to enforce that right. Civilians do not. That is not a legal technicality; that is a two-tier system, and it is exactly the sort of thing the Supreme Court should take up on Monday. The fact that a quarterback's injury on a Saturday afternoon became the vessel for that argument says less about football than about how little trust is left. Millions of people lost jobs, marriages strained, and families split over a mandate the government could not honestly justify. Those people are not going to be talked down, and no amount of institutional stonewalling is going to make them forget.
