My brother Walter, aka Fat Wally is in a tussle with the University of Virginia and its radical Left President, Jim “Lyin” Ryan. Fat Wally really isn’t fat, but just as truth should never get in the way of a good story, neither should it get in the way of a good nickname. Real men have nicknames for all their friends.
Before I get to the meat of FW’s beef, it is my duty as his brother to diss on him, because that’s what good brothers do. When FW was a student in Charlottesville, he had one remarkable trait that I have never seen anyone replicate. He could pass out standing up. His mouth would be wide open, he would be snoring, he would sway back and forth, but he would always stay upright. A popular fraternity game was to try and toss pieces of ice into his mouth from 25 feet away. The winner won the brown bag of libations FW was still clutching in his slumberous swaying stupor.
The University of Virginia has mandated that all students must be vaccinated by July 1, 2021 to enroll in class. The mandate was issued on May 20, 2021. The University has provided a form that lists a religious exemption for those not willing to be vaccinated. Thus, a University apparatchik decides whether your “religion” is worthy of being granted recognition and thus the exemption. No doubt the University, currently under a cloud of radical left wokeness will deem a murderous Islamic jihadist worthy of the exemption, but an evangelical Protestant will be denied as his religion will be tagged as a “hate group.” This at the school founded by Thomas Jefferson, the author of the 1777 Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom. Oh, the irony! Moreover, the form is nothing more than a contract of adhesion. You either get vaccinated, or you maintain your conscience and agree to be bound by unlimited future conditions, including losing your tuition, housing, etc. If the University gods on their Olympus mountain top grant your religious exemption, you are then relegated to a lower order of the progressive caste system, and have to submit to weekly prevalence testing and a whole host of outrageous restrictions (read page 2 of the link above and judge for yourself).
FW’s daughter is an incoming student. His concerns are twofold, 1) the vaccine can pose serious health risks, and 2) as a matter of principle and Constitutional law, requiring all students to be jabbed with an experimental drug is outrageous. FW wrote to Ryan and the Board objecting to the mandate, pleading for open meetings and letting people decide on their own to get vaccinated if they so wished. Rector Murray dismissively replied that the decision was based on advice from the UVA medical system on May 22.
FW responded to Rector Murray on May 24, asking for that “advice” under FOIA. UVA dodged the FOIA requests. FW then was forced to bring a Court action, where UVA responded that it has no duty to turn over any of the information that Ryan used to make the unilateral decision that all students must be vaccinated. It appears that Ryan did not seriously seek, solicit or review any of the developing and serious health consequences of the vaccine. Nor did he bother to take a walk through the thicket and tangled brambles of legal and ethical issues growing in his own garden. He just made the decision because all good cultural Marxists must adhere to the party line of Covid hysteria, a raw power, control mechanism to keep the plebeians in check.
Ryan is not a doctor, he does not know FW’s daughter or the vast majority of students in any meaningful way. He has not reviewed their medical files and has not examined them. Why is he qualified to make this very personal medical decision for others? FW has repeatedly called on him to publicly release all the data as to why the students must be vaccinated. He won’t. FW has asked Ryan to hold public hearings on the matter. He won’t, even though he publicly waxes on about free speech and transparency. Yet, all the while he silences any speech which challenges the extreme ignorance of the woke politics he proselytizes on a nearly daily basis. Recently, a student was kicked out of the medical school for simply asking questions at a “microagressions” “seminar,” aka an indoctrination. As he was not obsequious and fawning, the University decided he was rude. As dissent to woke politics is not allowed under Ryan’s leadership, the student’s conduct was reported on his very Stalinesque sounding “Professionalism Concern Card.” He then was determined “unfit” to remain at the University.
FW has tried to get Ryan and the board to explain the mandate in light of an assortment of federal laws and accepted standards: HIPAA, FDA “right to refuse,” 1st, 4th and14th Amendment concerns. He has asked him how this mandate can stand in light of the Hippocratic Oath? He has even cited the Geneva Convention, and its embrace of the Nuremberg Code, which was adopted in response to the experimental medical crimes committed by Nazis which were discovered during the Nuremberg Trials. At “Mr. Jefferson’s University,” one would expect that Ryan and the Board would relish a series of open discussions and debates on the issue. But no, nada, nothing. Ryan, President since 2018 has proven to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
My moles tell me that there are plenty of UVA medical people who are aghast at the vaccine mandate, but are afraid to speak up. Monolithic Marxism does not allow for any dissent, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the vaccine poses serious health risks for some and death to others. I know of several people who died shortly after receiving the shot. Although the “MSM” suppresses these stories, the VAERS, a voluntary system to report adverse vaccine events, indicates that thousands have died, and many more have had a wide variety of adverse reactions. In just the first 6 months of this year, the levels of severely “bad reactions” are in excess of a decade’s worth of bad reactions from all other vaccines and jabs.
Moreover, the VAERS may only have access to 10% of these incidents! The vaccine’s adverse reactions vary because people are not pieces of uniform chattel belonging to the state, they are individuals, and everyone is different. Even the CDC has acknowledged the myocarditis risk for young males. Dr. Robert Malone, the inventor of mRNA technology deployed in the vaccines has advocated for a suspension of vaccination of children and young adults, i.e. students, until further data is known. He also decries the censoring of data and stories concerning these adverse events. It is not hyperbole that the vaccine could kill students. It is an unapproved, not fully tested, Emergency Use Authorization drug. How does Ryan know that it won’t hurt a student and why does he have the right to make such a mandate?
Students who have had Covid have natural immunities. There is plenty of medical evidence that natural immunities are better than the vaccine. They are stronger and last longer than the man-made jabs and also protect against newer strains of the virus, where vaccines don’t. There is also a healthy body of evidence that vaccinating those who already have natural immunities may be dangerous.
I am not pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine. I am very wary of a medical procedure pushed with such vigor by the same political class and academic elites who have been so stunningly wrong on “everything Covid.” Students have a statistical 0% chance of dying from Covid, yet the University was shut down for more than a year. Shouldn’t students with the help of their parents make medical decisions for themselves?
FW is an academic phenom, an Evelyn Wood type reader. In school, he could practically absorb a text book by merely looking at it. He got his JD and MBA at Virginia at the same time while working a 50 hour week. He is incredibly bright and accomplished, and so is his daughter. They are endowed with natural liberty and can think for themselves. The students have these same liberties. To quote Mr. Jefferson, they are “endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights.” Mr. Jefferson was also not afraid of debate and the free expression of ideas. Indeed, he made this manifest when he stated in the Declaration that “a decent respect to the opinions of Mankind” required the American people to explain their break from Great Britain. Ryan, the anti-Jefferson, refuses to give students and their parents the same courtesy.
Fat Wally makes my Smith boy blood run hot and proud. He’s standing up for what’s right, but what about the ones who remain silent?
“And he who is not sufficiently courageous to defend his soul — don’t let him be proud of his ‘progressive’ views, and don’t let him boast that he is an academician or a people’s artist, a distinguished figure or a general. Let him say to himself: I am a part of the herd and a coward. It’s all the same to me as long as I’m fed and kept warm.” - Live Not By Lies, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
