Initially, there was professed bipartisan opposition to Covid vaccine mandates. “No, I don’t think [the shot] should be mandatory, I wouldn’t demand it be mandatory,” President-elect Biden told the press in December 2020. Dr. Fauci agreed. “You don’t want to mandate and try and force anyone to take a vaccine. We’ve never done that,” he explained. “It would be unenforceable and inappropriate.”
A few months later, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi echoed their sentiment. “We cannot require someone to be vaccinated,” she told reporters. “That is just not what we can do. It is a matter of privacy to know who is or who isn’t.” In July 2021, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said mandates were “not the role of the federal government.” She continued, “that is the role that institutions, private-sector entities, and others may take.”
At first, the experimental shots remained voluntary. Despite pressure campaigns, government-sponsored propaganda, and relentless false advertising, many Americans declined the “vaccines” without becoming second-class citizens.
That changed on September 9, 2021, when President Biden announced a dramatic policy shift to compulsory vaccination. “We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin,” he told Americans as he announced mandates that applied to nearly 100 million men and women.
He demanded all federal workers and contractors be vaccinated. Additionally, he announced an “emergency rule” that would require private employers with 100 workers or more to require vaccinations or implement weekly testing protocols. Dr. Fauci suddenly announced he supported “many, many more mandates.” He appeared at a conference of LGBT journalists to detail his shift in opinion. Compulsion was necessary, he explained. “You’d like to have [citizens] do it on a totally voluntary basis, but if that doesn’t work, you’ve got to go to the alternatives.” The alternative, of course, was an involuntary basis. The vaccine was optional only if people agreed to take it; then, he would reveal its true nature as a mandate.
The Covid regime got in line with the new messaging, and suddenly, former opponents of mandates like Pelosi described anti-mandate views as “alarming” and “fanning the flames of dangerous disinformation.” Mayor Bill de Blasio told New Yorkers, “We’ve got to shake people at this point and say, ‘Come on now.’ We tried voluntary. We could not have more kind and compassionate…No more. Get vaccinated, or you can’t work in New York City.”
DNC Chair Jaime Harrison went on MSNBC to decry Republicans’ “crazy” “meltdown” in response to President Biden’s mandates, insisting his party was “moving forward with protecting the American people.” The Democratic Party unequivocally endorsed vaccine requirements, criticizing “breathless and irresponsible talking points from Republican leaders.”
In January 2022, a poll showed that 59% of Democrats favored requiring unvaccinated citizens to remain confined to their homes, 55% of Democrats supported fines for the unvaccinated, 47% of Democrats favored a government tracking system for the unvaccinated, and 45% of Democrats supported internment camps for the unvaccinated.
The 180-degree change in opinion created obvious questions. Were Biden and Fauci right when they opposed mandates, or had their concerns been “breathless and irresponsible talking points?” Could states force children to receive Covid vaccines? Were these policies merely inadvisable, or were they overreaches of government authority?
Biden’s executive actions were largely unconstitutional and illegal. Mandates on children were capricious and immoral. The ramifications for local industries, government agencies, and the military were disastrous. The Covid regime shamelessly justified its actions with false claims of legal legitimacy. Each step was a calculated lie resulting in an assault on American liberties.
Can the State Mandate Sterilization?
“The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.”
– Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Advocates of the shots repeatedly cited a 1905 Supreme Court case that upheld a smallpox vaccine mandate. Jurists, politicians, and talking heads invoked Jacobson v. Massachusetts to argue that the government could require any medical program to support “public health.”
In the New York Times, Wendy Parmet suggested that challenging Jacobson’s “precedent” threatened “peril for other long-accepted public health measures.” CNN legal analyst Joey Jackson called government control “the question of the pandemic, which has really made so many people suffer.” He said Jacobson gave states the complete power to “mandate vaccinations.” Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich called the case “the essence of our society. If government can’t take action on behalf of the people with regard to public health, then what good is a society?”
Liberal judges agreed. Judge Frank Easterbrook of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals wrote, “given Jacobson v. Massachusetts…there can’t be a constitutional problem with vaccination against SARS-CoV-2.” The American Bar Association offered the glib headline “Not Breaking News: Mandatory Vaccination Has Been Constitutional for Over a Century,” arguing that Jacobson made Covid shot requirements “One-hundred percent constitutional.”
They were so self-assured that their supporters never asked them basic questions. What does Jacobson actually hold regarding mandates? Did the Court grant complete power to states? Could San Francisco require small doses of opiates to inoculate the population against fentanyl? Can the president require federal contractors to get the flu shot? Is that government power the “essence of our society?” Has medical freedom gone unchallenged at the Court for over a century?
Of course not, and the fanatics of the Covid vaccines misrepresented the case and deliberately omitted more recent and relevant opinions. The facts of Jacobson were straightforward: a smallpox epidemic arose in Massachusetts in 1902. The state required residents to get vaccinated or pay a $5 fine (about $150 in today’s currency). At the time, the smallpox vaccine had been in use for 100 years and prevented transmission. Outbreaks of the disease had a case fatality rate of up to 30%. The Supreme Court, in a decision written by Justice John Marshall Harlan, upheld the vax-or-fine program three years later.
The holding, however, was not a bright-line rule in favor of mandates. Harlan explicitly denied granting governments total power to implement public health measures. He wrote that courts must overturn statutes “purporting to have been enacted to protect the public health, the public morals, or the public safety” that have “no real or substantial relation to those objects” or constitute a “plain, palpable invasion of rights.”
In analyzing whether to uphold the smallpox vaccine initiative, he considered three factors: (1) whether the mandate was “arbitrary and not justified by the necessity of the case,” (2) whether it went “far beyond what was reasonably required for the safety of the public,” and (3) whether it was a “reasonable regulation” that had a “real and substantial relation” to the health of the citizens.
There were no demands to follow the science or trust the experts; instead, the critical analysis considered the danger posed to the overall population, alternatives to mandates, and a century of medical data.
Government agencies failed to prove each standard that Harlan cited in Jacobson, as explained by Gerard Bradley, a Constitutional Law professor at Notre Dame, and Dr. Harvey Risch, Professor Emeritus of Epidemiology at Yale. Jacobson not only didn’t make mandates “100 percent constitutional;” the Supreme Court’s opinion underlying the “essence of our society” suggested that Covid shot requirements were illegal. When viewed through the Court’s analytical framework, the Biden administration foisted a medical experiment on Americans that was unscientific, irrational, and unconstitutional.
Arbitrary and Oppressive
The first prong of Jacobson considers whether the requirement is arbitrary and oppressive. Bradley and Risch argue that the mandates were irrational, thus failing to meet the legal standard. Biden’s orders made no accommodations for citizens with natural immunity, and they applied to groups that faced no significant risk from the virus. “A policy requiring vaccination of people who are either already immune or of no consequence either for their own health or for spreading the infection is arbitrary,” they write. “It is oppressive in inflicting a medical procedure on people who do not need it for themselves or for others.”
Unlike smallpox, there were effective alternatives to vaccination, and the risk to the general public was negligible. Studies showed that natural immunity conferred protection that was up to 27 times stronger than the vaccine. Healthy children had no significant risks to Covid, yet bureaucrats across the country mandated them to receive the experimental, liability-free shots.
The punishments also offer stark contrast. In Jacobson, the non-compliant were issued a one-time $5 fine (approximately $150 today). They were not cast out of society, banned from restaurants, fired from their jobs, or prevented from attending school. The ramifications under the Covid regime were far more oppressive than a mere monetary penalty. Adults lost their livelihoods, children lost their educations, and citizens lost their right to attend public events.
If students had been given the option to add $150 to their overpriced tuition, they could have reasonably evaded the shots. But this wasn’t a penalty or a tax; the Covid mandates were a question of who got to engage in civil society.
Further, vaccine advocates deliberately omitted more recent decisions on medical freedom from the last century. At the very least, modern cases have updated the legal precedent for whether medical treatment is “arbitrary and oppressive.”
In 1990, the Court held that citizens have a constitutional right to refuse medical treatment, writing, “the principle that a competent person has a constitutionally protected liberty interest in refusing unwanted medical treatment may be inferred from our prior decisions. Seven years later, the Court wrote in Washington v. Glucksberg, “the right to refuse unwanted medical treatment is so rooted in our history, tradition, and practice as to require special protection under the Fourteenth Amendment.”
That protection would be at its apex in cases when treatment is ineffective and unnecessary. But proponents of mandates deliberately omitted inconvenient legal standards in their quest to impose vaccination on the country.
The Covid regime cited Jacobson as if it were the North Star of American jurisprudence, a canonical case like Brown v. Board of Education or Marbury v. Madison. Like the rest of their arguments, this was entirely misleading. Jacobson was the basis for the Court’s 1927 decision to uphold a state eugenics program in Buck v. Bell. The plaintiff in that case – Carrie Buck – was subject to Virginia’s involuntary sterilization program, and the Court embraced Jacobson in its opinion.
“The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes,” wrote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Now, Buck v. Bell stands alongside Dred Scott and Korematsu in the “anti-canon” of American constitutional law. But vaccine advocates gladly utilized the same reasoning to advance its agenda: the most widespread program of forced medical care in world history.
Unreasonableness
On the second issue – whether a mandate is reasonably required for public safety – Bradley and Risch argue that the government’s primary interest in vaccination is preventing the transmission of infection to others. The products not only fail this objective; the companies never tested whether they would reduce transmission before bringing them to market.
To make matters worse, mandates could be counterproductive. A March 2022 study found that the vaccine had negative efficacy in combating the virus for children under 11. The data showed that vaccinated children were 41% more likely to be infected than their unvaccinated peers six weeks after their shots. A later study of 96,000 California prison inmates showed that the unvaccinated had lower infection rates across all age groups than the vaccinated. A study from Pfizer showed that one in five people who received the Covid vaccines got Covid within two months.
Anecdotally, it was obvious that the shot wasn’t required to promote public safety. President Biden and the media chastised Green Bay Packers Quarterback Aaron Rodgers for testing positive for Covid after not getting vaccinated. “Tell your quarterback he’s got to get the vaccine,” the president shouted at a Wisconsin rally. In the opinion pages of the New York Times, writers attacked him for “disseminating misinformation” and his “irresponsible choice not to be vaccinated.” On MSNBC, Kavita Patel talked about how he put his teammates and their families at risk, calling football huddles, “literally the definition of close contact in a super spreader event.” On CNN, Dr. Peter Hotez said Rodgers touted “far-right extremist views” that caused the death of “150,000 unvaccinated individuals.”
None of the activists addressed how Rodgers got Covid. He hadn’t attended a dinner party with RFK, Jr. or shared a steam room with anti-vaccine advocates; vaccinated teammates gave him Covid from their “breakthrough infections.”
The evidence did nothing to change the regime’s devotion to mRNAs.
Nearly every advocate of the vaccine got Covid after receiving the maximum allotment of shots and boosters, including Joe Biden, Jill Biden, Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Jen Psaki, Karine Jean-Pierre, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Merrick Garland, Antony Blinken, Albert Bourla, Lloyd Austin, Gavin Newsom, Lindsey Graham, Eric Adams, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Kathy Hochul, Ted Lieu, Richard Blumenthal, Maxine Waters, Hakeem Jeffries, Rashida Tlaib, Chris Murphy, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, and more. As of February 2025, Anthony Fauci has had Covid at least three times, as has President Biden.
Their infections could not shake their faith, however, and they obediently thanked the “protection the vaccines provide.” “Vaccination remains a medical requirement for our workforce,” wrote Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in August 2022, promoting the effectiveness of boosters as he announced his positive Covid test.
By that point, the ineffectiveness of the vaccines was readily apparent. In November 2021, vaccinated English adults under 60 died at twice the rate of their unvaccinated counterparts. After achieving 90% vaccination rates, Denmark and the United Kingdom hit new highs for Covid infections in January 2022.
Third-world countries without widespread vaccine campaigns fared far better during Covid than the United States, despite the latter’s access to supposedly necessary medical products.
Madagascar has a population of approximately 30 million. Just 8% have received any dose of the Covid vaccine. As of January 2025, the country had under 1,500 Covid-related deaths since the pandemic began. Illinois has a population of 13 million, and 79% of residents received at least 1 dose of the Covid jabs. 36,000 Illinois residents have died from Covid.
New Jersey has a population of 9.2 million, 93% of whom have received at least one dose of the Covid vaccine. Haiti has a population of 11.5 million, and just 3.5% of the island nation received a dose of the Covid vaccine. Yet New Jersey had 36,000 deaths from Covid while Haiti had just 860.
Yemen has a population of 33 million, and 3.4% received a dose of the Covid vaccine. Massachusetts has a population of under 7 million, but the state has administered nearly 17 million Covid vaccine doses. Over 95% of the state has received at least one shot. Massachusetts had over 24,000 Covid deaths while Yemen had just 2,000.
Under Jacobson, the shots would have to be “reasonably required for the safety of the public.” Illinois had 25 times as many Covid deaths as Madagascar despite having a population of less than half its size and a vaccination rate ten times higher than the African island. New Jersey had thirty times the vaccination rate of Haiti yet suffered forty times as many Covid deaths. Massachusetts’s population is one-fifth the size of Yemen, and they jabbed people at thirty times the rate. Still, the Bay State suffered twelve times as many Covid deaths as Yemen did.
The data refutes any argument that the shots were “reasonably required” for public health. The evidence directly contradicts the standards of Jacobson, yet no talking heads examined the different fact patterns. Vaccine fanatics repeatedly misrepresented the constitutional justification behind the smallpox shot mandate, and they ignored the stark differences in the shots.
“Jacobson established criteria of Safety and Efficacy that must be shown beyond all doubt, that embody the provably safe and effective use of the vaccine for decades,” write Bradley and Risch. “The Covid-19 vaccines come nowhere near close to that standard.” While the smallpox vaccine had been a “staple in society” for nearly a century in 1905, the FDA still classified all Covid shots as “experimental” at the time of the mandates.
And the different standards yielded predictable results. Covid shots caused injuries at 24 times the rate of ordinary scheduled vaccines, a study showed in 2021. Politicians claimed they prevented transmission, then that they prevented hospitalization, then that they prevented death. Each stage of the moving goalposts was a lie, calculated disinformation to induce the public to get the shots.
The prevailing orthodoxy was the opposite of the truth. Jacobson didn’t support Covid vaccine mandates; it suggested they were unconstitutional and illegitimate. Imposing them on federal contractors, private employers, public-sector workers, and children was illegal. They failed under judicial scrutiny, and the Biden administration responded by trying to evade responsibility for their initiatives.
In June 2024, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals confirmed Bradley and Risch’s arguments, holding that Jacobson was inapplicable to Covid vaccine mandates. The Court of Appeals wrote:
“Jacobson held that mandatory vaccinations were rationally related to preventing the spread of smallpox. Here, however, plaintiffs allege that the vaccine does not effectively prevent spread but only mitigates symptoms for the recipient and therefore is akin to a medical treatment, not a ‘traditional’ vaccine. Taking plaintiffs’ allegations as true at this stage of litigation, plaintiffs plausibly alleged that the COVID-19 vaccine does not effectively ‘prevent the spread’ of COVID-19. Thus, Jacobson does not apply.”
That reasoning, however, meant nothing to the Biden White House, which declared absolute power to impose vaccine mandates.
The September 2021 Mandates
In September 2021, President Biden announced sweeping vaccine mandates. In total, the requirements forced one in three American adults to receive the shot or risk losing their livelihoods, a choice typically understood as coercion.
He announced plans to “sign an executive order that will now require all executive branch federal employees to be vaccinated – all. And I’ve signed another executive order that will require federal contractors to do the same.”
The order applied to all Americans working for companies that performed any federal work, even if their roles had no connection to the government collaboration. “Simply due to the misfortune of working for a company that may have a federal contract, an American may be forced to receive a vaccine they do not want or else lose their job,” a later lawsuit explained.
President Biden justified his edict under the Procurement Act, a federal law aimed to help the government enact an “economical and efficient system” for procuring services and property. He claimed, “ensuring that Federal contractors and subcontractors are adequately protected from COVID-19 will bolster economy and efficiency in Federal procurement.”
But the opposite was true. The mandates risked losing access to large swaths of the labor force that didn’t want to receive the shots. Biden never addressed how shrinking the labor pool would promote efficiency; when his administration was forced to defend his parchment declaration in court, the orders could not withstand judicial scrutiny.
In December 2021, a judge blocked the mandate for federal contractors from going into effect. The mandate “goes far beyond addressing administrative and management issues,” wrote District Court Judge Stan Baker. It “works as a regulation of public health, which is not clearly authorized under the Procurement Act.” Baker explained that the mandate created economic burdens, not efficiencies. Biden not only lacked a proper justification; he was effectuating the opposite of his professed intention. Judge Baker issued a nationwide injunction that prevented the order from going into effect.
The following month, another District Court Judge blocked the mandates. “[The orders] amount to a presidential mandate that all federal employees consent to vaccination against Covid-19 or lose their jobs,” wrote Judge Jeffrey V. Brown. “The President’s authority is not that broad.” It was a “bridge too far” for the White House “with a stroke of a pen or without the input of congress, to require millions of federal employees to undergo a medical procedure as a condition of their employment,” he explained.
The White House appealed the injunction, relying on Biden’s “economy and efficiency” justification. The 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals held arguments on the case that summer and upheld Judge Backer’s injunction in August 2022. The panel concluded that President Biden “likely exceeded his authority” under the Procurement Act.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton led states in filing suits against the Biden administration, demanding the invalidation of the September 2021 mandates. In May 2023, the White House announced the end of its vaccination requirements for federal employees and contractors, withdrawing the requirements before the case could reach the Supreme Court.
“Joe Biden egregiously exceeded his authority in his attempt to force all federal contractors to be vaccinated or face losing their jobs,” Paxton said in response. “It is beneath contempt for a President to threaten a worker’s ability to feed their family to achieve compliance with his mandates.”
Unwilling to undergo another potential judicial defeat, the White House withdrew its requirements, bringing the regime’s mandate policy full circle. The federal government had returned to Biden’s initial stance. Mandates were no longer “the role of the federal government,” as Jen Psaki had explained less than two years earlier. It again became “the role that institutions, private-sector entities, and others may take.”
OSHA
Congress created OSHA – the 1970 Occupational Safety and Health Act – to “prevent workers from being killed or seriously harmed at work.” The Act has led to workplace-specific protections like regulating exposure to asbestos, preventing trenches from caving in, and requiring licenses for hazardous jobs.
Just as Biden attempted to warp the Procurement Act to support his vaccine crusade, the White House sought to transform OSHA from a workplace protection program to a bludgeon to impose government policy on the private sector. President Biden’s executive order invoked OSHA to require all businesses with 100 or more employees to implement requirements for vaccines, testing, and masking.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki called the policies “critical to our nation’s COVID-19 response.” The Department of Justice argued that the programs were necessary to prevent “serious health consequences” from unvaccinated workers. The order applied to more than two-thirds of the private sector, accounting for over 80 million Americans.
Businesses and states filed lawsuits, arguing that the program exceeded the scope of President Biden’s authority. The President could not repurpose OSHA to two-thirds of the workforce, they maintained. They argued that Biden’s theory would give the Department of Labor “limitless, unprecedented power over American industry by allowing the agency to target dangers that exist in workplaces only because they exist in the world at large.” In January 2022, their case reached the Supreme Court.
The Court held that Biden’s mandate was illegal. “The Act [OSHA] empowers the Secretary of Labor to set workplace safety standards, not broad public health measures,” the majority wrote. But Covid was not a workplace safety issue – it spreads “at home, in schools, during sporting events, and everywhere else that people gather. That kind of universal risk is no different from the day-to-day dangers that all face from crime, air pollution, or any number of communicable diseases.” It was illegitimate to use a “general risk” to warp OSHA to the President’s demands to institute a “significant encroachment into the lives – and health – of a vast number of employees,” the Court wrote.
In a concurring opinion, Justice Gorsuch wrote that local authorities “possess considerable power to regulate public health” while federal powers remain “limited and divided.” Without those limits, he argued, “emergencies would never end and the liberties our Constitution’s separation of powers seeks to preserve would amount to little.”
Of course, the explicit aim of the executive mandates was to circumvent the separation of powers. As Dr. Fauci tellingly explained, voluntary compliance was insufficient to meet their demands. It was a program of mandatory conformity, and President Biden was unwilling to cede public health power to local governments. In September 2021, he infamously told the unvaccinated, “We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us.” It was his impatience, and resulting intolerance, that led him to issue his broad and illegal mandates.
The Covid regime denounced the Court’s decision. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told the press, “the Court has chosen to ignore the science and the law by preventing the Administration from keeping Americans safe in the workplace.” Fauci later told the New York Times that opposition to mandates was part of a “smoldering anti-science feeling, a divisiveness that’s palpable politically in this country.”
The White House quietly withdrew its OSHA mandates two weeks later. The agency later pretended the whole episode never happened. OSHA head Douglas Parker testified to Congress, “We didn’t threaten anyone, and we didn’t demand that anyone be fired.” Their tyrannical diktats were unable to withstand judicial scrutiny, yet they refused to admit error. The White House described how “President Biden marshalled a wartime effort” to increase vaccination rates. Approximately 30 million Americans received the vaccine within ten weeks of his first mandate. The effort had been illegal, but it had been successful.
Vaccinating Children
In just 8 months, Dr. Anthony Fauci went from publicly opposing all Covid vaccine mandates to suggesting they should be imposed upon schoolchildren. “I believe that mandating vaccines for children to appear in school is a good idea,” he told CNN in August 2021. He compared it to the polio vaccine and urged school districts to force parents to jab their children for a disease that posed no risk to them.
Like the discussion surrounding Jacobson, public officials and talking heads acted as if this were uncontroversial. If the anointed Tony Fauci had called for it, then the orders must be worshiped. Again, however, the mandates couldn’t withstand simple scrutiny.
Jenin Younes, an attorney with the New Civil Liberties Alliance, explained in the Wall Street Journal, “Forced Covid vaccination for kids is unlawful.” She addressed Fauci’s comparison to “standard childhood shots” like polio and diphtheria, explaining that “those decades-old vaccines have gone through the full FDA testing regime” while “the Covid vaccine [had] received only emergency-use authorization” (EUA) for children in fall 2021.
Federal law prohibits patients from being forced, coerced, or pressured into taking EUA products. Requiring children to get shots in order to participate in public life or attend school was the “antithesis of free and informed consent is therefore unlawful,” Younes argued.
Those rather basic legal principles were lost in the hysteria of Covid. Like their years of lost youth and education, Fauci and the White House proposed sacrificing children’s freedoms to advance their agendas. Younes concluded her article, “Let’s not make forced vaccination of young children, which is unconstitutional and illegal under federal law, the next way in which we disregard their interests to mollify adults’ irrational fears.”
But the regime plowed ahead. In October 2021, California became the first state to announce that Covid vaccines would be required for students once it had FDA approval. “The state already requires that students are vaccinated against viruses that cause measles, mumps, and rubella – there’s no reason why we wouldn’t do the same for COVID-19,” Gavin Newsom explained as he celebrated his new mandate. Washington, D.C., Detroit, and other areas announced similar plans.
Apparently siloed in a bubble of coronamania, lawmakers were shocked to find parents resisted their orders as they refused to vaccinate their children for a disease that didn’t harm them. In the District of Columbia, the government announced that it would postpone its mandate when nearly half of DC public school students remained unvaccinated after the deadline to get the shots passed. Mayor Eric Adams dropped vaccine requirements for New York City student-athletes when vaccination rates hovered around 50%. California courts found that school mandates in Los Angeles and San Diego were illegal, delaying the enforcement of Newsom’s vaccine campaign into the 2022-2023 school year. In February 2023, California quietly dropped its Covid mandate for students. The Newsom Administration leaked the news to the press without any accompanying announcement or explanation.
“Children have a right to bodily autonomy and to refuse unnecessary medical treatment, which their parents exercise on their behalf,” Younes wrote in her argument. “The government can’t conscript them as guinea pigs or vessels to protect adults.” Parents’ exercise of those rights halted the mandates. As of 2023, approximately two-thirds of American children remained “unvaccinated” according to the CDC. Just 7% of children had received the recommended boosters. Even in Democratic-leaning areas, fewer than one in eight children were “up-to-date” with their recommended Covid shots. Mass resistance, rather than the rule of law, withstood the tyranny of the regime.
Downstream Consequences
Not only were the means illegal, but the ends were disastrous. At least 8,000 troops were kicked out of the US military for declining to take the Covid vaccine. In 2022, the military reported zero Covid deaths among active troops, but Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin insisted on continuing the mandates.
He was clear in his orders. In December 2022, the press asked who was responsible for the policies. Austin responded, “I’m the guy.” He added, “I support continuation of vaccinating the troops.” The Pentagon continued to force healthy soldiers to choose between the vaccine or expulsion from the military, regardless of prior infection, until senators intervened.
In January 2023, Senators Rand Paul and Ted Cruz added requirements to the National Defense Authorization Act that forced the Defense Department to repeal its mandate. The Pentagon did not concede its irrationality; however, it later announced that it would not offer back pay to any troops discharged for failure to comply with the mandate.
Lloyd Austin gloated that he had forced soldiers to choose between an experimental vaccine and their service to their country. In a memo, he announced that he was “deeply proud of the Department’s work to combat the coronavirus disease,” adding that his edicts “will have a lasting legacy in the many lives we saved.”
But Austin has never had to answer for the cost-benefit analysis of his decisions. At the same time that the military hit historic shortfalls in its recruitment efforts, his mandate cut the strength of American forces. The purported benefit was increasing the number of troops who took an ineffective vaccine for a virus that did not threaten their health. In January 2025, President Trump reinstated service members who were fired for refusing the vaccine. His executive order described the act as “correcting an injustice,” citing that “in spite of the scientific evidence, the Biden Administration discharged healthy service members—many of whom had natural immunity and dedicated their entire lives to serving our country—for refusing the COVID vaccine. Government redress of these wrongful dismissals is overdue.”
But the damage, in large part, had already taken effect, and the disruptions were not limited to the military. After President Biden’s vaccine orders in September 2021, Southwest announced a vaccine requirement for all staff and pilots. The Southwest Airlines Pilots Association filed suit to stop the mandate. Two days later, the airline cancelled 1,800 flights over Columbus Day weekend, blaming bad weather and staff shortages.
As the mandate continued, so did delays, cancellations, and staffing shortages. In June 2022, 1,300 Southwest employees picketed the Dallas Airport to protest the vaccine requirement. “Why are we having a staffing shortage?” asked Tim Bogart, a Southwest pilot. “I believe it’s because of the COVID vaccines.”
The country is less efficient and less safe; citizens experience a continuing decline in quality of life; children are less healthy, and vaccine injuries permanently damage families. Those struggles can be directly tied to the top-down mandates that took over nearly every sector of American life. They were illogical, immoral, and illegal; and the most influential members of our society – from the legal world, the media landscape, and the levers of government power – facilitated and guaranteed their implementation.
The post Covid Response at Five Years: The Illegal Vaccine Mandates appeared first on Activist Post.
* This article was originally published here