To vaccinate or not to vaccinate? That’s a choice that is increasingly being taken away from American citizens by the totalitarians who have found the coronavirus pandemic to be extremely handy for acquiring and exercising power.

Mark Alexander recently covered the efforts and trial balloons coming from President Joe Biden and his handlers to mandate vaccination and masking. If masks work, why get vaccinated? If vaccines work, why mask up? The only answer leftists give to those questions: Shut up!

News broke yesterday that the Biden administration seems to have concluded that the “carrot” approach to its vaccination push isn’t working. Team Biden is now reportedly considering using the “stick” of withholding federal funds in order to get more Americans vaccinated. That could mean blocking money from reaching entities ranging from universities to cruise lines to nursing homes. Even The Washington Post admits this “would amount to a dramatic escalation” in the vaccination push.

Ya think?

Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and other Democrats spent 2020 telling Americans not to trust the vaccines, politicizing the issue in order to defeat Donald Trump. As soon as he did defeat Trump, Biden claimed credit for those same vaccines and ramped up the push to get shots in arms. It began with kindly advice but quickly became haranguing and browbeating. It’s no wonder it may soon devolve into coercion.

Which will convince exactly no one to get vaccinated.

Never mind that, though. Leftists always know better than you do. “If you look through history, there are presidents who — even in the absence of legal authority — influence people, you might say,” said Ezekiel Emanuel, a medical bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania. “We keep referring to this COVID thing like it’s an emergency and then we don’t behave like it’s a wartime emergency.” If Emanuel’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he was one of the architects of ObamaCare, another thing built in the absence of legal authority. He’s also the guy who once argued that life after 75 pretty much isn’t worth living. But sure, take his advice on vaccination.

Biden has already ordered that federal contractors must be vaccinated or mask up (and they could face a five-year prison sentence for lying), and he’s got the Pentagon considering the same thing. Furthermore, Biden may implement a requirement that all foreign nationals traveling to the U.S. be fully vaccinated — well, at least those coming legally.

How is that not racist and xenophobic? (That’s the accusation Biden threw at Trump when it came to travel restrictions in the early stages of the pandemic.)

Meanwhile, the list of major corporations and other entitles requiring employees to get vaccinated is growing by the day. To varying degrees, and just to name a few, that list includes the NFL, Facebook, Google, Disney, Walmart, Netflix, United Airlines, Tyson, and CNN.

Some city and state governments are likewise cracking down, or encouraging businesses to do so. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has other things to worry about, but on Monday he pushed private businesses to “go to vaccine-only admission.”

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said, Hold my beer. On Tuesday, he announced a mandate that all indoor venues in the city must require proof of vaccination as a condition of entry. “If you want to participate in our society fully,” de Blasio said, “you’ve got to get vaccinated.”

One might ask the Democrat mayor why he won’t allow 69% of blacks in his city to “participate in our society fully.” Or why he’s treating 58% of Hispanics as second-class citizens. Isn’t that racist?

Once again, we come back to the unmistakable truth that leftist bullies are using COVID as an opportunity to consolidate power that they did not or should not have. It’s for your own good, of course.