If you don't want to have a Covid vaccine, get a job enforcing vaccine mandates.

Hypocrisy at its finest

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Last week the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) quietly sent round a memo exempting officials from vaccine mandates. Why is this so hypocritical? Well, because the officials they were exempting from the vaccine mandate were officials hired to enforce the very same vaccine mandate.

So it seems the easiest way to get around the vaccine mandate is to get a job enforcing the vaccine mandate.

I’ve probably said vaccine mandate a few too many times now, so here is the memo itself.

The Biden administration first announced the mandates back in August 2021, stating that healthcare and nursing home staff must be COVID-19 vaccinated or lose funding. After legal challenges, different deadlines were imposed with the final deadline occurring on 21 March 2022.

Vaccine mandate deadlines encouraged/forced (take your pick) employees to get vaccinated with uptake rising from 63% to 88% in a number of months. Doctors, nurses and staff who still decided that vaccination was not for them, lost their jobs.

In February, the CMS warned state survey agencies that they must enforce all federal health and safety requirements or lose federal financial support. Although it didn’t explicitly say so, this was widely recognised as a warning to Florida and other states that had said they would not enforce vaccine mandates. Furthermore, the CMS said they would bring in outside surveyors if states did not comply with their directives.

CMS surveyors were given the role of evaluating whether healthcare workers were complying with federal vaccine mandates. They stated that staff vaccination under 100% would constitute non-compliance. However, the extremely reasonable CMS (sarcasm) said that any facility with over 80% of its staff vaccinated would be given 60 days to reach 100% without further action being taken.

Brian Harrison, state representative of Texas and former chief of staff for the Department of Health and Human Services under the Trump administration, said in an interview with Newsmax “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. These mandates must end."

Harrison thinks that after the CMS enforced the mandates on its own surveyors, they were unable to live under the same rules. "They couldn't take it. So instead of taking down the mandate, which would have been the normal common sense solution, they just exempted their own government contractors instead of all the Americans."

Rules for thee, not for me.