President Joe Biden said on Tuesday that his administration is considering mandating that all federal workers get the COVID-19 vaccine.
“That’s under consideration right now,” Biden said when asked if federal employees should be required to get vaccinated.
Biden was in McLean, Virginia to address members of the intelligence community.
Biden also blamed people who are unvaccinated for fueling the pandemic, in a response to a question about whether the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s new mask guidance sowed confusion in Americans.
“We have a pandemic because of the unvaccinated and they’re sowing enormous confusion,” Biden said, adding that “And there’s only one thing we know for sure, if those other hundred million people got vaccinated, we’d be in a very different world. So get vaccinated, if you haven’t, you’re not nearly as smart as I said you were.”
The Department of Veterans Affairs says it is invoking a vaccination mandate on its employees, becoming the first federal agency to do so, with Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough stating that it was “because it’s the best way to keep Veterans safe, especially as the Delta Variant spreads across the country.”
California and New York City said they would also require their government workers to get vaccinated or be tested on a weekly basis.
The federal government has shifted from appealing to Americans, regardless if they have recovered from COVID-19 and have natural immunity, to get vaccinated to now blaming those, who haven’t received a vaccine, for the state of the pandemic.
Opponents of mandatory vaccination say that all three COVID-19 vaccines offered in the United States are only granted an emergency use authorization (EUA) and are still waiting to receive full approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) pending the safety and efficacy results of the ongoing Phase 3 trials.
As early as October of 2020, Dr. Amanda Cohn, the executive secretary of the CDC’s vaccine safety committee said that the federal government can’t force people to receive a vaccine under an EUA.
“I want to thank Dr. [Janell] Routh for her great presentation and clarify one point, which is just for the public record that the federal government cannot mandate vaccines,” Cohn said at the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee meeting (pdf).
“Organizations, such as hospitals, with licensed products do have the capability of asking their workers to get the vaccine. But in the setting of an EUA, patients and individuals will have the right to refuse the vaccine,” she added.
The FDA has also said back in November 2020 that people “have the option to accept or refuse the vaccine, and of any available alternatives to the product” after being informed of the benefits and risks, and that the vaccines are not FDA-approved.
Under an emergency authorization, vaccine manufacturers are not held liable for any injury, including death, that their COVID-19 vaccine may cause. People or a representative of an individual who has been seriously injured have a year after receiving a vaccine to file a claim and prove their injury with a federal government program called the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program.
From The Epoch Times
