Commentary President Joe Biden recently extended the U.S. national emergency for covid-19. A confrontation between truckers protesting Canadian covid mandates and the government in Ottawa has turned ugly. The debate over covid mandates has turned toward authoritarian tactics rather than the merits of the mandates. Irrespective of the debate on the merits of covid mandates over the past two years, at the present time, covid mandates have become a solution in search of a problem. Figure 1 illustrates the rapid decline of the Omicron outbreak over the past three weeks. New cases in Lubbock County, Texas, are near zero in a population of over three hundred thousand. Yet a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) mandate requiring healthcare workers to be vaccinated against covid-19 still stands. The stated goal of the vaccine mandate is to protect vaccinated workers against unvaccinated workers and to protect patients against unvaccinated workers. It has been previously argued that …