Brownstone Institute
Vaccine Mandates 3 Years Ago This Week
From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
By Jeffrey A. Tucker of the Brownstone Institute
The people who I was meeting found a restaurant that would allow us in even without showing proof of vaccination. We came in the back way and sat at a table near the back to avoid possible detection from the police who were going venue to venue to enforce the rules.
Three years ago on Sept. 9, 2021, the Biden administration released an executive order on “Requiring Coronavirus Disease 2019 Vaccination for Federal Employees.” It pertained to all federal employees including the military and contractors too. It was just the beginning. The agency OSHA issued an edict that imposed mandates on all businesses with more than 100 employees, plus health care and transportation workers.
Every Human Resources in corporate America got the memo and started the implementation, cutting many people out of a job. At first it did not matter as much for many because people were still working at home. But as people started coming back to the office, the mandates got tighter and tighter, and the mask mandates alongside them. Sometimes there were exemptions for people who agreed to be constantly tested but even those started to dissipate over time.
The frenzy for mandates got extreme by year’s end. The city of New York shut down all its public accommodations to the unvaccinated. You could not go to a restaurant, even fast food, without proof of vaccination. You could not have a beer in a bar. You could not go to the library or theater. Concert tickets required them and so did comedy clubs. The idea was that this would help business because it would make people feel safe. The opposite happened as the unvaccinated ended up avoiding the city entirely.
With New York City as the example, other cities got on board. The idea of medical segregation spread to Boston, Chicago, Washington, D.C., New Orleans, and Seattle. Those who declined to get the untested shot, either because they feared side effects or simply believed that they did not need them, were limited in their travel options. They were the great excluded.
These mandates disproportionately harmed minority populations. The lowest uptake of the vaccines was among the black community, which distrusted them based on a long and egregious history of medical experimentation. Major media took it upon themselves to claim that the refuseniks were disproportionately living in red states, failing to mention that within these states, it was the blue voters who refused them the most.
Many people in these cities found it easiest to forget a piece of paper since the venues did not really care anyway, and only vaguely looked as a formality. We still have no idea just how many of these fake IDs were issued. Was it 20 percent, 50 percent, or more? We’ll probably never know but the Biden administration did in fact prosecute people for fake IDs, so doing so came with some risks. And one would never upload a fake card to any digital media source for purposes of travel or otherwise.
Finally the legal challenges started taking hold. On Jan. 13, 2022, the Supreme Court ruled against OSHA’s mandate on private business and contractors but kept in place the mandate on health-care workers who were more likely than others to have natural immunity from exposure. In any case, the businesses that had already imposed them were unphased by this decision and were slow to let them go, simply because so many had already made enormous sacrifices to comply.
The devastation on business was already done. Politico reported in October 2021 that “Defense and industry officials are sounding warning bells that weapons programs crucial to America’s defense could face delays if enough skilled workers walk-off the job instead of following President Joe Biden’s executive order for all federal employees and contractors to take the Covid vaccine by Dec. 8.” Also affected of course was aviation which experienced a pilot shortage and labor shortage generally. Flight delays and cancellations became a normal event, and it continues to this day.
At some point during the closure of New York City, I needed to be in town to meet a possible donor for a nonprofit. The people who I was meeting found a restaurant that would allow us in even without showing proof of vaccination. We came in the back way and sat at a table near the back to avoid possible detection from the police who were going venue to venue to enforce the rules. Many restaurants were forced to decide between compliance and profitability.
All of this came following a year in which closures had deeply harmed the bottom line. When they were opened, it was only at half-capacity and many had to build outdoor sections because it was widely believed at the time that the virus lived indoors but not in outdoor areas. The mask mandates also applied to all servers while the customers could sit maskless while eating. None of it made any sense but it all happened anyway.
While all of this virus chasing was going on, complete with the segregation and mask enforcement, basic functions of government like protecting the border were sidelined. This led to a migrant crisis in major cities and towns all over the country. That is still going on today, as there is no willingness on the part of those in charge to deport the millions who took advantage of the COVID-19 chaos to hop over the border (with no checks on their vaccine status).
As we look back, it seems almost hard to believe that any of this happened but it did. And then to top it off, it had become increasingly clear even from the spring of 2021 that the vaccine was not protective against infection nor transmission. It had long been known that healthy adults and children were not at medically significant risk from the virus but even among those who were, the shot did not provide the kinds of protection traditionally associated with vaccines.
None of this information deterred those who pushed the mandates. People living abroad, even family members of U.S. citizens, were simply not allowed into the country without proof of vaccination. That mandate survived for years. Even today, the shot is required for obtaining citizenship, which means that the mandates still survive in some form.
This mad rush to force the shot on everyone stems from a long history of belief that vaccines can only control a disease if everyone gets them. That was true of Smallpox and perhaps polio and measles. But that perception entirely hinges on the sterilizing quality of the vaccines themselves, which these new shots certainly did not have. Therefore there was no basis for the mandates at all. If ever there was living proof of a madness pushed toward the irrational use of force this was it.
We still have no firm numbers on the number of people who lost their jobs or gave them up and otherwise experienced professional displacement as a result of these mandates. But certainly the numbers are in the millions. As injury reports began to pour in, it became clear that this was at least in terms of reporting the most dangerous pharmaceutical product called a vaccine issued in our lifetimes. But the companies themselves had been granted full protection from liability from harm, which is to say that there was nothing that the victims could do.
This is the third anniversary of the executive order that unleashed this whole divisive and destructive campaign. A painful anniversary it is. For many people, and for a whole generation, this was the equivalent of the conscription mandates in the Vietnam War, a move against the civilian population that fundamentally disrupted the social contract and shattered the trust we once had in official institutions. It will never be forgotten by those who lived through it.
And yet even now, we wonder what lessons have been learned, if any.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown.
Jeffrey A.Tucker’s interview with David Leis on Leaders on the Frontier can be seen here.
From the Brownstone Institute
Anthony “I represent science” Fauci can now stand beside Richard “I am not a crook” Nixon in the history books as someone who received the poison pill of a preemptive pardon.
While Nixon was pardoned for specific charges related to Watergate, the exact crimes for which Fauci was pardoned are not specified. Rather, the pardon specifies:
Baseless and politically motivated investigations wreak havoc on the lives, safety, and financial security of targeted individuals and their families. Even when individuals have done nothing wrong – and in fact have done the right things – and will ultimately be exonerated, the mere fact of being investigated and prosecuted can irreparably damage reputations and finances.
In other words, the dying breath of the Biden administration appears to be pardoning Fauci for crimes he didn’t commit, which would seem to make a pardon null and void. The pardon goes further than simply granting clemency for crimes. Clemency usually alleviates the punishment associated with a crime, but here Biden attempts to alleviate the burden of investigations and prosecutions, the likes of which our justice system uses to uncover crimes.
It’s one thing to pardon someone who has been subjected to a fair trial and convicted, to say they have already paid their dues. Gerald Ford, in his pardon of Richard Nixon, admitted that Nixon had already paid the high cost of resigning from the highest office in the land. Nixon’s resignation came as the final chapter of prolonged investigations into his illegal and unpresidential conduct during Watergate, and those investigations provided us the truth we needed to know that Nixon was a crook and move on content that his ignominious reputation was carve d into stone for all of history.
Fauci, meanwhile, has evaded investigations on matters far more serious than Watergate. In 2017, DARPA organized a grant call – the PREEMPT call – aiming to preempt pathogen spillover from wildlife to people. In 2018 a newly formed collaborative group of scientists from the US, Singapore, and Wuhan wrote a grant – the DEFUSE grant – proposing to modify a bat sarbecovirus in Wuhan in a very unusual way. DARPA did not fund the team because their work was too risky for the Department of Defense, but in 2019 Fauci’s NIAID funded this exact set of scientists who never wrote a paper together prior or since. In late 2019, SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan with the precise modifications proposed in the DEFUSE grant submitted to PREEMPT.
It’s reasonable to be concerned that this line of research funded by Fauci’s NIAID may have caused the pandemic. In fact, if we’re sharp-penciled and honest with our probabilities, it’s likely beyond reasonable doubt that SARS-CoV-2 emerged as a consequence of research proposed in DEFUSE. What we don’t know, however, is whether the research proceeded with US involvement or not.
Congress used its constitutionally-granted investigation and oversight responsibilities to investigate and oversee NIAID in search of answers. In the process of these investigations, they found endless pages of emails with unjustified redactions, evidence that Fauci’s FOIA lady could “make emails disappear,” Fauci’s right-hand-man David Morens aided the DEFUSE authors as they navigated disciplinary measures at NIH and NIAID, and there were significant concerns that NIAID sought to obstruct investigations and destroy federal records.
Such obstructive actions did not inspire confidence in the innocence of Anthony Fauci or the US scientists he funded in 2019. On the contrary, Fauci testified twice under oath saying NIAID did not fund gain-of-function research of concern in Wuhan…but then we discovered a 2018 progress report of research NIAID funded in Wuhan revealing research they funded had enhanced the transmissibility of a bat SARS-related coronavirus 10,000 times higher than the wild virus. That is, indisputably, gain-of-function research of concern. Fauci thus lied to the American public and perjured himself in his testimony to Congress, and Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has referred Fauci’s perjury charges to the Department of Justice.
What was NIAID trying to preempt with their obstruction of Congressional investigations? What is Biden trying to preempt with his pardon of Fauci? Why do we not have the 2019 NIAID progress report from the PI’s who submitted DEFUSE to PREEMPT and later received funding from NIAID?
It is deplorable for Biden to preemptively pardon Fauci on his last day in office, with so little known about the research NIAID funded in 2019 and voters so clearly eager to learn more. With Nixon’s preemptive pardon, the truth of his wrongdoing was known and all that was left was punishment. With Fauci’s preemptive pardon, the truth is not yet known, NIAID officials in Fauci’s orbit violated federal records laws in their effort to avoid the truth from being known, and Biden didn’t preemptively pardon Fauci to grant clemency and alleviate punishment, but to stop investigations and prosecutions the likes of which could uncover the truth.
I’m not a Constitutional scholar prepared to argue the legality of this maneuver, but I am an ethical human being, a scientist who contributed another grant to the PREEMPT call, and a scientist who helped uncover some of the evidence consistent with a lab origin and quantify the likelihood of a lab origin from research proposed in the DEFUSE grant. Any ethical human being knows that we need to know what caused the pandemic, and to deprive the citizenry of such information from open investigations of NIAID research in 2019 would be to deprive us of critical information we need to self-govern and elect people who manage scientific risks in ways we see fit. As a scientist, there are critical questions about bioattribution that require testing, and the way to test our hypotheses is to uncover the redacted and withheld documents from Fauci’s NIAID in 2019.
The Biden administration’s dying breath was to pardon Anthony Fauci not for the convictions for crimes he didn’t commit (?) but to avoid investigations that could be a reputational and financial burden for Anthony Fauci. A pardon to preempt an investigation is not a pardon; it is obstruction. The Biden administration’s dying breath is to obstruct our pursuit of truth and reconciliation on the ultimate cause of 1 million Americans’ dying breaths.
To remind everyone what we still need to know, it helps to look through the peephole of what we’ve already found to inspire curiosity about what else we’d find if only the peephole could be widened. Below is one of the precious few emails investigative journalists pursuing FOIAs against NIAID have managed to obtain from the critical period when SARS-CoV-2 is believed to have emerged. The email connects DEFUSE PI’s Peter Daszak (EcoHealth Alliance), Ralph Baric (UNC), Linfa Wang (Duke-NUS), Ben Hu (Wuhan Institute of Virology), Shi ZhengLi (Wuhan Institute of Virology) and others in October 2019. The subject line “NIAID SARS-CoV Call – October 30/31” connects these authors to NIAID.
It is approximately in that time range – October/November 2019 – when SARS-CoV-2 is hypothesized to have entered the human population in Wuhan. When it emerged, SARS-CoV-2 was unique among sarbecoviruses in having a furin cleavage site, as proposed by these authors in their 2019 DEFUSE grant. Of all the places the furin cleavage site could be, the furin cleavage site of SARS-CoV-2 was in the S1/S2 junction of the Spike protein, precisely as proposed by these authors.
In order to insert a furin cleavage site in a SARS-CoV, however, the researchers would’ve needed to build a reverse genetic system, i.e. a DNA copy of the virus. SARS-CoV-2 is unique among coronaviruses in having exactly the fingerprint we would expect from reverse genetic systems. There is an unusual even spacing in the cutting/pasting sites for the enzymes BsaI and BsmBI and an anomalous hot-spot of silent mutations in precisely these sites, exactly as researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have done for other coronavirus reverse genetic systems. The odds of such an extreme synthetic-looking pattern occurring in nature are, conservatively, about 1 in 50 billion.
The virus did not emerge in Bangkok, Hanoi, Bago, Kunming, Guangdong, or any of the myriad other places with similar animal trade networks and greater contact rates between people and sarbecovirus reservoirs. No. The virus emerged in Wuhan, the exact place and time one would expect from DEFUSE.
With all the evidence pointing the hounds towards NIAID, it is essential for global health security that we further investigate the research NIAID funded in 2019. It is imperative for our constitutional democracy, for our ability to self-govern, that we learn the truth. The only way to learn the truth is to investigate NIAID, the agency Fauci led for 38 years, the agency that funded gain-of-function research of concern, the agency named in the October 2019 call by DEFUSE PI’s, the agency that funded this exact group in 2019.
A preemptive pardon prior to the discovery of truth is a fancy name for obstruction of justice. The Biden administration’s dying breath must be challenged, and we must allow Congress and the incoming administration to investigate the possibility that Anthony Fauci’s NIAID-supported research caused the Covid-19 pandemic.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
This article was co-authored with Mary Beth Pfieffer.
In a seismic political shift, Republicans have laid claim to an issue that Democrats left in the gutter—the declining health of Americans. True, it took a Democrat with a famous name to ask why so many people are chronically ill, disabled, and dying younger than in 47 other countries. But the message resonated with the GOP.
We have a proposal in this unfolding milieu. Let’s have a serious, nuanced discussion. Let’s retire labels that have been weaponized against Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., nominated for Health and Human Services Secretary, and many people like him.
Start with discarding threadbare words like “conspiracy theory,” “anti-vax,” and the ever-changing “misinformation.”
These linguistic sleights of hand have been deployed—by government, media, and vested interests—to dismiss policy critics and thwart debate. If post-election developments tell us anything, it is that such scorn may no longer work for a population skeptical of government overreach.
Although RFK has been lambasted for months in the press, he just scored a 47 percent approval rating in a CBS poll.
Americans are asking: Is RFK on to something?
Perhaps, as he contends, a 1986 law that all but absolved vaccine manufacturers from liability has spawned an industry driven more by profit than protection.
Maybe Americans agree with RFK that the FDA, which gets 69 percent of its budget from pharmaceutical companies, is potentially compromised. Maybe Big Pharma, similarly, gets a free pass from the television news media that it generously supports. The US and New Zealand, incidentally, are the only nations on earth that allow “direct-to-consumer” TV ads.
Finally, just maybe there’s a straight line from this unhealthy alliance to the growing list of 80 childhood shots, inevitably approved after cursory industry studies with no placebo controls. The Hepatitis B vaccine trial, for one, monitored the effects on newborns for just five days. Babies are given three doses of this questionably necessary product—intended to prevent a disease spread through sex and drug use.
Pointing out such conflicts and flaws earns critics a label: “anti-vaxxer.”
Misinformation?
If RFK is accused of being extreme or misdirected, consider the Covid-19 axioms that Americans were told by their government.
The first: The pandemic started in animals in Wuhan, China. To think otherwise, Wikipedia states, is a “conspiracy theory,” fueled by “misplaced suspicion” and “anti-Chinese racism.”
Not so fast. In a new 520-page report, a Congressional subcommittee linked the outbreak to risky US-supported virus research at a Wuhan lab at the pandemic epicenter. After 25 hearings, the subcommittee found no evidence of “natural origin.”
Is the report a slam dunk? Maybe not. But neither is an outright dismissal of a lab leak.
The same goes for other pandemic dogma, including the utility of (ineffective) masks, (harmful) lockdowns, (arbitrary) six-foot spacing, and, most prominently, vaccines that millions were coerced to take and that harmed some.
Americans were told, wrongly, that two shots would prevent Covid and stop the spread. Natural immunity from previous infection was ignored to maximize vaccine uptake.
Yet there was scant scientific support for vaccinating babies with little risk, which few other countries did; pregnant women (whose deaths soared 40 percent after the rollout), and healthy adolescents, including some who suffered a heart injury called myocarditis. The CDC calls the condition “rare;” but a new study found 223 times more cases in 2021 than the average for all vaccines in the previous 30 years.
Truth Muzzled?
Beyond this, pandemic decrees were not open to question. Millions of social media posts were removed at the behest of the White House. The ranks grew both of well-funded fact-checkers and retractions of countervailing science.
The FDA, meantime, created a popular and false storyline that the Nobel Prize-winning early-treatment drug ivermectin was for horses, not people, and might cause coma and death. Under pressure from a federal court, the FDA removed its infamous webpage, but not before it cleared the way for unapproved vaccines, possible under the law only if no alternative was available.
An emergency situation can spawn official missteps. But they become insidious when dissent is suppressed and truth is molded to fit a narrative.
The government’s failures of transparency and oversight are why we are at this juncture today. RFK—should he overcome powerful opposition—may have the last word.
The conversation he proposes won’t mean the end of vaccines or of respect for science. It will mean accountability for what happened in Covid and reform of a dysfunctional system that made it possible.
Republished from RealClearHealth
Author
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