WASHINGTON (LifeSiteNews) — More than 40 Republican members of Congress are calling for an end to federal COVID-19 vaccine mandates, in a pair of appeals that is likely to fall on deaf ears within the Biden White House.
The Daily Wire reports that ten senators, including Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and Rand Paul, signed a March 4 letter urging their colleagues to join them as they “remain strongly opposed to the mandates and … continue to work to end their imposition on Americans,” followed by a March 7 letter by 36 House members, including Ralph Norman, Elise Stefanik, and Louie Gohmert, warning Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas that vaccine mandates on truckers will lead to “limitations and delays [that] will have a catastrophic impact on our already fragile supply chain and proliferate rising food prices.”
“History will bear record of whether we chose to endure tyranny, or oppose it, in this pivotal moment,” reads the Senate letter. “We invite you to stand with us and oppose the continued funding of these mandates.” It stresses that “this is a GOP conference position,” and “as such, it should be a part of the negotiation for inclusion in any spending bill.” The signatories urge their colleagues to demand a roll call vote on an amendment to defund whatever vaccine mandates remain in effect, which would not succeed in taking effect but would put every member of the Senate on the record and place pressure on mandate supporters going into the midterm elections.
The House letter, meanwhile, is focused on the Department of Homeland Security’s vaccine mandate for “all non-U.S. citizens entering the United States through land ports and ferry terminals,” which “appl[ies] to non-U.S. citizens who are traveling for both essential and non-essential reasons, including H-2A temporary agricultural workers and truck drivers.”
“Our nation is facing a major food supply chain crisis and worker shortage. Shelves in grocery stores remain empty, and the price of food continues to rise,” the representatives write. “For decades, agricultural employers who anticipate a shortage of domestic workers have brought nonimmigrant foreign workers to the U.S. to perform agricultural labor or services of a temporary or seasonal nature through the H-2A temporary agricultural program. Now that these H-2A workers are required to be fully vaccinated to enter the U.S., we have heard from numerous farmers and constituents who worry that these new vaccination requirements are delaying and will continue to delay the arrival of H-2A workers this year.”
“We call for you to provide employers and employees flexibility regarding the vaccine requirement, and we look forward to working with you to reach a solution that protects our borders, our workforce, and our supply chain,” the letter concludes.
While the Biden administration’s efforts to force Americans to take COVID shots have been met with legal setbacks, and various Democrats across the nation have been backing away from unpopular COVID restrictions, President Joe Biden declared in his State of the Union address last week that his administration “will never give up on vaccinating more Americans … We will continue vaccinating the world.”
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 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, the 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 216 million Americans (almost 65% 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.