It’s official: the federal COVID-19 pandemic emergency ends in just a few days! The announcement from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) explained that the initial emergency declaration was “designed to provide flexibility and minimize burdens for the health care industry as it faced the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on current COVID-19 trends, HHS plans to let the COVID-19 Declaration expire at the end of the day on May 11, 2023.”
“Provide flexibility and minimize burdens” is a neat bureaucratic euphemism for “throwing liberty out the window,” but nevertheless, the end of the pandemic emergency is worth celebrating.
I’m sure we can expect the White House to spike the football over doing something that it should’ve done a long time ago, but one thing that the administration will probably let pass by with less of a mention is the end of most of the federal vaccine mandates.
The Washington Times reports that the administration tied the end of the mandates to the end of the pandemic emergency because of “progress in living with the virus, with death rates at their lowest levels since the pandemic began in early 2020” and “widespread compliance among the federal workforce, with 98% of the workforce receiving at least one dose of a vaccine or securing an exemption as of January 2022.”
I guess it’s easy to tout “widespread compliance” when the government threatened the employment and livelihood of those it thought should get the shots and many people chose quitting their jobs over getting the jabs.
“Our Administration’s vaccination requirements helped ensure the safety of workers in critical workforces including those in the healthcare and education sectors, protecting themselves and the populations they serve, and strengthening their ability to provide services without disruptions to operations,” bragged a statement from the White House. It added, “Our COVID-19 vaccine requirements bolstered vaccination across the nation, and our broader vaccination campaign has saved millions of lives.”
Millions of lives? Really? Is there a standard by which the White House can measure that millions of people would have died without the vaccine?
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National Review’s Jim Geraghty reminded readers of his email that Joe Biden was against vaccine mandates before he was for them.
“Back in December 2020, before Biden took office, he said, ‘I don’t think they should be mandatory. I wouldn’t demand it to be mandatory,'” Geraghty wrote. “But less than a year later, Biden changed his mind. He announced the vaccine mandates on September 9, 2021, more or less blaming the continuing Covid cases on the unvaccinated.”
Remember the rhetoric about the “pandemic of the unvaccinated?” Remember when the administration — and Biden himself — told us that people who hadn’t gotten the jab would get sick and die? (That reminds me: I never received my “I Survived the Winter of Severe Illness and Death” t-shirt. Can somebody check on that for me, please?)
Biden framed receiving the vaccine as a moral good when he said, “The vast majority of Americans are doing the right thing.” I don’t fault anyone for deciding to get the vaccine because it’s a choice like any of the countless ones we make every day, but to frame taking the shot as “the right thing” automatically otherizes those who don’t do so as wrong.
He didn’t stop there. In the same speech, Lunchbucket Joe went Dark Brandon, instructing the unvaxxed public that vaccination “is not about freedom or personal choice” — Say what, now? — and lecturing us that “We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us.” I have no doubt that Biden would have mandated the shots (and maybe even the endless boosters) for all Americans if he could have.
Geraghty wrote:
In the end, the federal vaccine mandates represented a broken promise, a vast and unconstitutional overreach that scapegoated Americans for a continuing pandemic that wasn’t their fault, proved difficult or nearly impossible to enforce, worsened and exacerbated divisions, drove 8,300 otherwise fine servicemen and women out of the military, and had only a middling at best effect on the problem it attempted to solve.
In other words, they were a classic Joe Biden policy.
And now, the White House is ending the mandates with minimal fanfare. I guarantee you there won’t be an apology to those who lose their jobs, and there won’t be job offers for those the feds fired for not getting the shot. The Biden administration wouldn’t dare admit any fallibility or fault, even though countless Americans are dealing with the consequences of the pandemic policies every day.
Does anybody else want to talk about “doing the right thing”?
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