JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: So what’s the difference between this and telling employers, where sparks are flying in the workplace, your workers have to be — wear a mask?

MR. KELLER: When sparks are flying in the workplace, that’s presumably because there’s a machine that’s unique to that workplace. That is the —

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Why is the human being not like a machine if it’s spewing a virus, blood-borne viruses? Are you questioning Congress’s power or desire that OSHA do this? It already in 1991 told OSHA to issue regulations with respect to Hep C and B.

Leave aside the fact that COVID isn't "blood-borne" — in case you're wondering, the authorization for hepatitis in the workplace is expressly stated in the statute, which undermines her argument that the statute's more general language contains an implicit congressional power to treat all human workers as potential workplace hazards. I guess if I were a progressive pundit, I'd write 20 self-righteous lines on the history of degrading others by seeing them as disease vectors no different as dangerous machinery, but I believe readers get the point: We should not go down this route.

Then there was Justice Breyer, arguing that it should be acceptable for OSHA to adopt regulations that drive workers out of the workplace because, hey, some people might quit rather than work with unvaccinated others:

And they said, in our view, hmm, yeah, that’s right, some people may quit, maybe 3 percent. But more may quit when they discover they have to work together with unvaccinated others because that means they may get the disease.

When Breyer remarked "unvaccinated people," the raw transcript fails to reflect the disdain in his voice. The Court's liberals contend that it's permissible for workplace regulations to drive away employees because other individuals could resign rather than work with them, which is a surprising turn of events. Imagine the outrage if this had been spoken by a judge concerning, say, HIV-positive persons. Justice William Brennan was defending a tuberculosis-affected teacher in 1987. What a shift in liberal attitudes there has been.

The irony, of however, is that the Omicron form renders the entire idea of unvaccinated persons posing a risk to the vaccinated outdated, as it transmits just as easily between vaccinated and unvaccinated people. That doesn't negate the need of vaccination; the increased ease with which the disease spreads means you're putting yourself at higher danger by not being vaccinated, because it's harder to avoid the sickness, making it all the more important to build your immunity against serious illness. However, this discourse of unvaccinated workers being harmful subhuman presences in the workplace is already out of date in 2022.

If you have ever been, or known, a teenager, you know that even comparatively well-informed teens are almost always just advancing arguments they’ve heard from adults, and typically without much consideration of the opposing arguments. . . . I’m never in favor of the whole spectacle of using kids as political props, which both sides do, but it’s one thing when it’s relatively benign stuff — a politician campaigning with his family, a Trump or an Obama bringing out a young fan or honoring a kid who did something good. Those aren’t efforts to use kids as human shields against hard questions being asked in a serious public-policy debate. Turning “listen to the kids” into a mantra and marching a few steps behind them is. That’s particularly the case because divisive issue debates inevitably mean the people carrying the point of the spear are going to come in for a lot of pushback from people who feel viscerally about the other side of the issue. Pushing distraught teenagers to the forefront means they will be the ones absorbing that. As adults, we are supposed to know better than that.

They went on anyhow, and David Hogg is now a propaganda-addled fanatic with a million Twitter followers who is incapable of talking like a regular college student. Rittenhouse, for one, is having a tough time finding work or getting into college right now, but it's a disservice to this young man for people who should know better to attempt to turn him into our side's response to Hogg or Greta Thunberg instead of allowing him go back to growing up peacefully.