WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – Two Republican members of Congress accused the Biden administration Wednesday of using “coercion” to elicit the air travel industry’s compliance in mandating COVID-19 vaccines for its workers.
It is “unacceptable that your administration is using the threat of contractual measures as a coercion to single out American workers in a vital national industry,” House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee ranking member Rep. Sam Graves and aviation subcommittee senior member Rep. Garrett Graves (no relation) wrote in a letter to President Joe Biden, Reuters reported.
“We strongly urge you to rethink this ill-conceived mandate which will result in the termination of employees whose jobs were saved over the last 18 months at enormous taxpayer expense,” the lawmakers continued. “This unilateral mandate and arbitrary deadline [of December 8] will serve only to disrupt airline operations and increase the likelihood of canceled flights.”
Biden declared Thursday that he considers those job terminations an acceptable trade-off:
BIDEN: "When you see headlines and reports of mass firings, and hundreds of people losing their jobs, look at the bigger story…United went from 59% of their employees [vaccinated] to 99%…" pic.twitter.com/nOAKjLkfVM
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) October 7, 2021
On September 9, Biden announced that he was directing the U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL’s) Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to draft a rule that will, according to the White House, “require all employers with 100 or more employees to ensure their workforce is fully vaccinated or require any workers who remain unvaccinated to produce a negative test result on at least a weekly basis before coming to work.”
Biden also announced new vaccination rules for federal employees and government contractors, but the bulk of the controversy focused on the administration’s intrusion into the decisions of private-sector employers and employees, which is expected to affect more than 80 million Americans.
A month after that announcement, OSHA still has yet to give employers a specific, finalized guidance on the mandate, but the Republican lawmakers were reacting to news that White House COVID-19 coordinator Jeff Zients called the CEOs of American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and Southwest Airlines to urge them to impose vaccination mandates on the grounds that “vaccination requirements work. New data reinforces that fact each day.”
After that call, Southwest and American announced that they will comply by the deadline for federal contractors, while Delta says it has not yet decided. United Airlines previously imposed its own mandate with a deadline of October 2; that deadline has since been delayed pending lawsuits by pilots and other employees.
Since taking office, Biden has attempted to rhetorically pressure and legally coerce COVID vaccinations instead of answering concerns about their safety and effectiveness, which stem from the fact that they were developed and released far faster than any previous vaccine.
Vaccine defenders note that the one-year development period was not starting from scratch but rather relied on years of prior research into mRNA technology; and that one of the innovations of the Trump administration’s “Operation Warp Speed” was conducting various aspects of the development process concurrently rather than sequentially, eliminating delays unrelated to safety. However, those factors do not fully account for the condensing of clinical trial phases — each of which can take anywhere from 1-3 years on their own — to just three months apiece.
While cases of severe harm reported to the federal Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) after taking COVID shots represent less than one percent of total doses administered in the United States, a 2010 report submitted to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services’ (HHS) Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) warned that VAERS caught “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events.”
May reporting from NBC News quotes several mainstream experts acknowledging “gaps” in federal vaccine monitoring, and a Project Veritas investigation released in September shows insiders at a federal medical facility speaking candidly about serious medical complications they’ve seen after COVID vaccination that are not being reported.
The Biden administration has clung to the narrative that the COVID-19 vaccines are the key to ending the pandemic even in the face of a growing body of data indicating that increasing vaccination compliance does not correlate with decreased spread of COVID-19. On Wednesday, ABC News reported that more Americans died of COVID-19 this year (353,000) than in all of 2020 (352,000), according to data from Johns Hopkins University, despite 65% of the population being considered “fully vaccinated” by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
Nevertheless, on Thursday Biden reiterated the false claim that the COVID-vaccinated “cannot spread it to you,” despite his own CDC director, Rochelle Walensky, admitting two months earlier that “what [the vaccines] can’t do anymore is prevent transmission.”
LifeSiteNews has produced an extensive COVID-19 vaccine resource page that can be viewed here, and a resource guide on how to resist COVID vaccine mandates that can be viewed here.