WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the federal agency that enforces COVID-19 vaccine mandates for hospitals and healthcare workers throughout the U.S., rescinded its injection mandate for its own employees, Newsmax reported.
Texas Republican Rep. Brian Harrison, who served in the Trump administration as the chief of staff for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), told Newsmax’s “Wake Up America” on Tuesday that “if you don’t want to have to take a vaccine, just get a job enforcing the vaccine mandate.”
“If you were one of these officials tasked with enforcing their tyrannical COVID vaccine mandate, you can be exempt from the vaccine mandates,” Rep. Harrison said, referring to a June 16 CMS memo he obtained that announced the rescission of the agency’s mandate for its “surveyors.”
🚨BREAKING: CMS just EXEMPTED officials hired to enforce their vaccine mandate…from the vaccine mandate! My office obtained the memo. Stunning hypocrisy. These mandates must end. #txlege pic.twitter.com/vsVEpVpZuK
— Brian Harrison (@brianeharrison) June 20, 2022
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“This shows that the Biden administration is truly authoritarian and these mandates never had anything to do with public health in the first place, but sadly and tragically, they had much more to do with giving the federal government more control over our lives,” the congressman added. “These mandates must end.”
In January, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the federal COVID-19 vaccine mandate for healthcare workers despite simultaneously striking down a sweeping requirement aimed at employees of large companies. A Texas challenge to the mandate was dismissed by a federal judge.
Rep. Harrison, who introduced the Texas COVID Vaccine Freedom Act to ensure that Texans “have the right to provide or withhold consent for any medical treatment,” told the news outlet that he believes CMS backed off its mandate for employees because “they got a taste of their own medicine.”
According to Harrison, the agency “mandated it for their own enforcers,” but the same individuals who forced others to get the shots “couldn’t live with it the second they had to live under the same rules.”
The Texas representative added that “the way our government is supposed to be set up” is that people must “live under the rules [they] make.”
LifeSiteNews reached out to CMS for comment but has yet to hear back.