The President mandated vaccines based on false statements, faulty science, outright lies, and flawed legal reasoning only to be rejected by the Supreme Court after untold people lost their jobs, American rights were trampled, and the country thrown into chaos. These days, this should be an indictable offense.
On November 4, 2021, President Joe Biden formally announced a national vaccine mandate that had never been implemented in the history of the country, radically expanding the power of the Presidency without anything resembling a vote in Congress. A statement explaining the new measures began by falsely claiming vaccination was the key to ending a pandemic that had wracked the country for over 18 months at that point. “For our country, the choice is simple: get more people vaccinated, or prolong this pandemic and its impact on our country. The virus will not go away by itself, or because we wish it away: we have to act. Vaccination is the single best pathway out of this pandemic.” Here, the President was echoing the sentiment of leading public health officials on the government payroll including Dr. Anthony Fauci and then Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Rochelle Walensky, who had insisted for months that the vaccine stops the spread of the COVID-19 virus and that vaccinated people do not carry the virus at all. “Vaccinated people do not carry the virus — they don’t get sick,” she told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow in March of that year. That’s “not just in the clinical trials, but it’s also in real-world data.” Even at the time, there were healthcare experts who cautioned that this conclusion was not justified including some in the CDC itself. “There cannot be any daylight between what the research shows — really impressive but incomplete protection — and how it is described,” Dr. Peter Bach, director of the Center for Health Policy and Outcomes at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, told the New York Times. “This opens the door to the skeptics who think the government is sugarcoating the science,” he added, “and completely undermines any remaining argument why people should keep wearing masks after being vaccinated.” “Dr. Walensky spoke broadly during this interview,” the CDC clarified. “It’s possible that some people who are fully vaccinated could get Covid-19. The evidence isn’t clear whether they can spread the virus to others. We are continuing to evaluate the evidence.”
This clarification did not prevent Dr. Walensky from continuing to make false statements on the protection offered by the vaccine including under oath in front of Congress. As late as last June 2023, she continued to insist that “initially” it did stop the spread and therefore it wasn’t a false statement in the first place. “For the Wuhan strain and the Alpha strain, all of the data in the literature published in the New England Journal demonstrated that for those who worked, if you didn’t get infected, that you were not transmitting it to other people and it had very high efficacy early on, up to 96%, it did change over time.” The only problem: She was aware of and discussing these breakthrough infections as early as January 2021 during the very initial roll out of the vaccine. In an email to her team, she referenced a phone call with the head of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, Dr. Fauci’s boss at the time, “I had a call with Francis Collins this morning and one of the issues we discussed was that of vaccine breakthroughs. This is clearly and [sic] important area of study and was specifically called out this week here.” Incredibly, the rest of the obviously non-classified message was redacted except for “Should we discuss? What is the best step forward? Francis is also discussing with Tony [Dr. Fauci.]” We do not know what occurred afterwards, but based on their public statements the outcome was pretty clear: They would disregard any evidence and continue to make false statements about the vaccine preventing both the spread and the infection. Dr. Fauci did so on many occasions speaking in his official capacity as a government employee. “So even though there are breakthrough infections with vaccinated people, almost always the people are asymptomatic and the level of virus is so low it makes it extremely unlikely — not impossible but very, very low likelihood — that they’re going to transmit it,” Dr. Fauci said. “When you get vaccinated, you not only protect your own health and that of the family but also you contribute to the community health by preventing the spread of the virus throughout the community,” he continued. “In other words, you become a dead end to the virus. And when there are a lot of dead ends around, the virus is not going to go anywhere. And that’s when you get to a point that you have a markedly diminished rate of infection in the community.” It is also worth mentioning that – despite these claims to the contrary – the vaccine itself was never tested for stopping transmission and there was no reason to believe that it should. Dr. Fauci himself recently published a paper claiming that no vaccine for a respiratory virus has ever done so. “They replicate predominantly in local mucosal tissue, without causing viremia, and do not significantly encounter the systemic immune system or the full force of adaptive immune responses, which take at least 5–7 days to mature, usually well after the peak of viral replication and onward transmission to others.”
This leaves us with two choices: We can believe that Dr. Fauci and Dr. Walensky truly believed the coronavirus vaccine was unlike any other respiratory pathogen vaccine in history and magically prevented both infection and contagion, even though it was never tested for that purpose, or we can assume they were intentionally making false statements in support of administration policy which was clearly focused on vaccination regardless of the results. As the summer of 2021 turned to fall, President Biden repeatedly maligned though who refused to take the vaccine and continued to pursue the unprecedented mandate policy. “This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. And it’s caused by the fact that despite America having an unprecedented and successful vaccination program, despite the fact that for almost five months free vaccines have been available in 80,000 different locations, we still have nearly 80 million Americans who have failed to get the shot…Nearly three quarters of the eligible have gotten at least one shot, but one quarter has not gotten any. That’s nearly 80 million Americans not vaccinated. And in a country as large as ours, that’s 25 percent minority. That 25 percent can cause a lot of damage — and they are.” Less than two months later, he announced the new mandate. “Today, the Labor Department issued its rule requiring COVID-19 vaccinations for companies with 100 or more employees. If you work for one of these companies you will either need to get vaccinated or test at least weekly.” Though the federal government had never before done such a thing in the history of the country, he insisted “vaccination requirements are nothing new. We’ve been living with them throughout our lives for all sorts of diseases. Safety rules in the workplace are nothing new either. We require hard hats in construction sites and safety goggles in labs. And with today’s actions, we now have requirements to protect people from something that has taken the lives of 750,000 Americans.” Workplace safety rules were mentioned because that is where the administration magically found this authority. They understood it was impossible to pass a legitimate mandate through Congress – assuming it is not unconstitutional to begin with – and so they based their legal reasoning on the law that established the Occupational Health and Safety Administration.
The only problem was the 1972 law had never been used this way before and right up until the President sought to repurpose it for his mandate, no one seriously believed it applied. President Biden’s Press Secretary, Jen Psaki, said as much to reporters prior to announcing the mandate. When asked, “Is that a sign that perhaps the federal government should step in and issue mandates? And if not, are you putting the needs of unvaccinated people ahead of the needs of vaccinated people?” She replied, “Well, I think the question here — one, that’s not the role of the federal government; that is the role that institutions, private-sector entities, and others may take…What our role is and what we are going to continue to do is make the vaccine available. We’re going to continue to work in partnership to fight misinformation. And we’re going to continue to advocate and work in partnership with local officials and — and trusted voices to get the word out.” This was in July, but by November the mandate was suddenly the role of the federal government and the President had all the authority he needed – until the case went before the Supreme Court, and the mandate was blocked, meaning Ms. Psaki was correct before she was incorrect. To be sure, progressive pundits attempted to put up a good show, pretending a workplace safety law suddenly applies outside the workplace, but even then, they had to rely on essentially loaded terms like “imaginative” and “novel” to describe the action. After the ruling striking down the mandate, The New Republic’s Matt Ford claimed, “More ominous is the basic mindset that girds the conservative justices’ thinking in both cases. In its view, the executive branch cannot use its existing powers imaginatively to address novel matters of public concern…The real ruling appears to be this: The Biden administration can only try new solutions to new problems if it runs them through a gerrymandered House and a filibuster-friendly Senate first. All those laws that Congress already spent two centuries writing and updating? They don’t count anymore—or, barring that, there are countless new restrictions and limits to be found in their text.” Kimberly Wehle, a professor of law at the University of Baltimore School of Law, claimed something similar in an article for Politico. The “biggest loser coming out of these decisions is not the president’s reputation as a problem solver but decades of constitutionally established power-sharing between the legislative and executive branches. And the winner, if that’s the right term, is the Supreme Court itself, which has executed an unprecedented power grab and masked it as an act of judicial restraint.” What’s missing, of course, is any actual justification for a massive extension of power based entirely upon false statements, save that progressives wanted the mandate and therefore it was acceptable.
This was not merely an esoteric legal argument, either. As a direct result of mandates in general, the federal government’s unprecedented mandate, and threats of mandates, millions of people lost their jobs, either getting fired or quitting. A CNBC survey put the figure at 5% of unvaccinated people who lost their jobs between the announcement and final blockage of the mandate. A smattering of headlines says it all. NPR, October 21, 2021, “Thousands of workers are opting to get fired,” ABC7 San Francisco, “COVID vaccine refusal 10th highest reason for job cuts in 2021, report says.” “Roughly 5,000 people that lost their jobs in the last month due to COVID vaccine refusal made up actually 22% of the total number of people that we tracked being let go across the country,” Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc.’s Senior VP Andy Challenger told the network. “As I’m talking to companies, as I’m talking to HR leaders, there really is a lot of turmoil within their organizations across just about every sector,” he added when asked about the impact of the looming federal mandate. Even worse, there was no relief provided to any of these employees after the Supreme Court struck the mandate down. “Employees who previously lost their jobs or were denied jobs because of mandates that employers decided to impose generally have no recourse,” Bob Nichols, a partner at international law firm Bracewell LLP told Human Resources Director. “The OSHA-required testing was not going to go into effect until Feb. 9, so it didn’t impact anyone. All that really went into effect of substance was this week unvaccinated employees were supposed to be wearing masks.” Unfortunately, a total number of job losses is impossible to find, but certainly tens of thousands, if not close to a million, representing millions in lost wages, if not more. This is a direct harm stemming from the Federal government’s illegal policy, one which was based almost entirely on false statements. Even if you disregard the mandate, if the Biden Administration had told the truth about what the vaccines were capable of and what they were incapable of, a truth they knew as early as January 2021, almost immediately after taking office, many of these losses could have been spared. They did not – for reasons that remain entirely unclear – they pursued a strategy based on a lie and abrogated power to themselves that they did not have. Lives were destroyed as a result.
The question before us today: How is this not a conspiracy according to Special Counsel Jack Smith? Former President Donald Trump has recently been charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstruction of and an attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights. In this case, President Biden appears to check all the relevant legal boxes except for perhaps obstruction. The mandate itself was based on false statements and fraudulent interpretations of data, and evidence suggests they knew this at the time or were so woefully incompetent as to make no difference. The mandate itself was a conspiracy against rights Americans have enjoyed since the founding, and was ruled unconstitutional. Thousands or more were deprived of the basic right to work. Obstruction, meanwhile, could be said to include the operation of the federal government. The policy certainly disrupted the normal role of OSHA, likely taking resources away from workplace safety, the false statements made from department heads certainly obstructed lower level employees actually trying to come to terms with the science rather than embrace an unprecedented policy. Overall, the President mounted an unprecedented intrusion into daily life based on a falsehood, ultimately lost at the Supreme Court, and then moved on as if nothing happened while the ashes of peoples’ careers lay in his wake. Why has he not been indicted if this is the new standard?
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 