(LifeSiteNews) — With fears brewing over a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine, President Joe Biden’s State Department has advised Americans in Ukraine to take refuge in neighboring Poland … but only if they’ve been vaccinated for COVID-19.
On February 11, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan warned that the possibility of an invasion was “immediate enough” that “any American in Ukraine should leave as soon as possible,” and that those who did not “are assuming risk with no guarantee that there will be any other opportunity to leave and no prospect of a U.S. Military evacuation in the event of a Russian invasion.”
The next day, the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine published a notice that “Poland has indicated to the U.S. government that U.S. citizens may now enter Poland through the land border with Ukraine” without “advanced approval.” However, the statement went on to claim that “U.S. citizens must present a valid U.S. passport and proof of COVID-19 vaccination. Travelers are also encouraged to present a negative test result from a PCR or antigen COVID-19 test, which will facilitate entry into Poland.”
However, Poland’s own rules state only that vaccination is required to avoid a potential quarantine upon entry, not that Americans will be turned away if they are unvaccinated.
This email from @StateDept to Americans in Ukraine is strange.
Poland doesn’t require proof of vaccination for American citizens who want to enter the country.
So… this is a Biden Administration policy? Leave the unvaccinated in a potential war zone? pic.twitter.com/95VglBoNEi
— Christina Pushaw 🐊🚛 (@ChristinaPushaw) February 13, 2022
On Tuesday, the Embassy released another statement announcing that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have determined it was “in the national interest” to waive proof of vaccination for entering Poland, indicating the rule was an American requirement rather than a Polish one.
The follow-up also suggests that the Biden administration reversed course after being inundated with criticism over the prospect of abandoning Americans to a violent end purely on the basis of vaccination status, echoing President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan before evacuating Americans.
Many Americans continue to harbor serious reservations as to the COVID vaccines’ safety, stemming in large part from the rushed nature of their creation. The Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed initiative developed and released the shots in a tenth of the time vaccine development usually takes and a quarter of the time it took the previous record-holder, the mumps vaccine, yet their advocates have done little to address the concerns of the hesitant.
During a COVID-19 vaccine hearing held by U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) last month, attorney Thomas Renz presented medical billing data from the Pentagon’s Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) showing that 2021 saw drastic spikes in a variety of diagnoses for serious medical issues over the previous five-year average, including hypertension (2,181%), neurological disorders (1,048%), multiple sclerosis (680%), Guillain-Barre syndrome (551%), breast cancer, 487%), female infertility (472%), pulmonary embolism (468%), migraines (452%), ovarian dysfunction (437%), testicular cancer (369%), and tachycardia (302%).
In a statement to left-wing “fact-checking” outlet PolitiFact, Defense Health Agency’s Armed Forces Surveillance Division spokesperson Peter Graves confirmed the existence of the records but claimed that a conveniently-timed “data corruption” glitch made the pre-2021 numbers appear far lower than the actual numbers of cases for those years, which PolitiFact took at face value.
Meanwhile, data indicates that widespread dissemination of the COVID vaccines has failed to end the pandemic. The federal government considers more than 214 million Americans (over 64% of the eligible) to be “fully vaccinated” (a moving target given the vaccines’ temporary nature), yet data from Johns Hopkins University reported last October shows that more Americans died of COVID-19 by that point in 2021 (353,000) than in all of 2020 (352,000). The Moderna vaccine has been available throughout all of 2021; the Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson shots were made available in late February.