Government and personal protective equipment

There are many professions in which danger and risk cannot be avoided. Many of these are essential to maintaining our society, have a functioning economy, and let us exercise our liberties. Ironically, often the very things that are supposed to protect us end up being harmful. And often, things we are told we must do or use to protect ourselves and our economy and our liberty turn out to be more harmful than leaving things be.

As noted by Cowboy State Daily, some government agencies are now allowing crewmen fighting wildfires to wear masks to protect them from airborne hazards. This long-overdue permission slip corrects one of many problems with government rules and regulations.

Consider helmets (hard hats) on highways. The Responder Safety website recently posted this article. In any profession (yes, even fast food workers and office staff), there are hazards. If you cannot eliminate them, substitute something that is safe, use something that isolates you or protects you from the hazard, or warnings about hazards and workplace rules are not able to adequately protect you? Then you get to wear PPE: personal protective equipment.

PPE is constantly improving. Standards change. And every type of PPE (yes, even including human senses and the first/foremost PPE (the human brain) has limits and almost always causes additional hazards or increases the risk of injury or ill health from exposure. An example is gloves. Gloves protect us from heat and cold, from abrasions and cuts, from corrosive and other chemicals. But wearing gloves reduces our dexterity, makes it hard to use touch and feel to do our work and warn us, and is something that moving devices can catch on and injure us even more. All PPE has downsides to use.

This struck home to us here at TPOL recently. The neighbor of a family in our congregation is an EMT who works on the wildfire-fighting lines all over the nation. While in Oregon, he fell into a coma without warning and was medevaced to a hospital. Tests revealed a large mass in his brain: a cancer of some sort. The cause of that cancer? Long periods of exposure to certain chemicals used in both fighting fires and in protecting the firefighters. Among the many hazardous, carcinogenic or even mutagenic substances are so-called “forever chemicals” (commonly called PFAS – “per- and poly-fluorinated alkyl substances”). Their purpose? To make clothing flame-resistant and to shield against heat. Like asbestos, the valuable uses accepted for decades have been eclipsed by the deadly short- and long-term results of exposure to, and entry into the human body.

Often (as with many medications and certain vaccines, as well as products like cigarettes and chewing tobacco), the detrimental effects of these substances were known for decades. But despite that, governments not only allowed their use, but actively encouraged and even required their use.

Note, please, as lovers of liberty, we here at TPOL believe that no government should have the power to prevent or allow use of anything. That is a personal choice, one given by God to us humans when He created us: to decide for ourselves whether to own, use, or ingest/inhale/imbibe/inject/etc. a substance or a tool, a plant, or animal. But we know that human government thinks it has the legitimate power to deny or permit ownership or use. And far too many humans think so also. But worse than just claiming powers that governments should not have? Governments which encourage, require, and even subsidize the ownership and use of things which are known to be hazardous. Threats to human life, health, and safety.

But there are many problems when governments try to address hazards and try to reduce risks of injury and ill health for people – workers, children, retired, etc. So many problems that government efforts routinely fail, while making work and life more miserable. And often, not just fail but create still more risks because we are exposed to more hazards when trying to comply with the government laws and procedures. All at the same time as we hand more power over us to government agencies, and give them the opportunity to seize power from us.

Mandated vaccines, top-down standards for equipment and procedures, and poorly-understood and -written rules, regulations, and guidelines all are examples of how government actually exposes us to more harm while claiming to protect us for our own good and in spite of ourselves.

Which is why implementing PPE and indeed all control measures to deal with hazards and reduce the risk to workers should be in the hands of private, non-political, and competent people. We cannot trust government, or any agency, to do the job properly. And we have little to no control over it.

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