The Unkillable COVID Health Care Inoculation Mandate Is Killing Health Care

Staffing Shortages Are A Harsh Lesson In The Costs Of Lawless Governance

At the end of January, the President finally admitted that it was time to end the COVID “emergency”.

The Curtain Finally Falls On The Pandemic Panic Narrative

After more than three years of propaganda, politics, and Pfizer poison, President Asterisk is finally calling “time” on the COVID emergency (aka, the “pandemic” that never was).

President Joe Biden informed Congress on Monday that he will end the twin national emergencies for addressing COVID-19 on May 11, as most of the world has returned closer to normalcy nearly three years after they were first declared.

The move to end the national emergency and public health emergency declarations would formally restructure the federal coronavirus response to treat the virus as an endemic threat to public health that can be managed through agencies’ normal authorities.

Yet while much of the government detritus that accumulated throughout this non-emergency “emergency” has been either cancelled or revoked by Congress or various state legislatures, one extremely obnoxious example of government excess remains seemingly unkillable: the health care inoculation mandate.

The health care vaccination mandate is scheduled to run until November 2024. But some contend it’s time to stop now, citing fewer severe COVID-19 cases, health care staffing shortages and the impending May 11 expiration of a national public health emergency that has been in place since January 2020.

By the time the health care inoculation mandate imposed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) expires, the “emergency” which spawned it will have been officially over for a year and a half.

That health care inoculation mandates are unnecessary and ultimately ineffective, just as has been shown with all other COVID-related mandates, is by now a given. The lack of scientific and factual basis for all inoculation mandates was demonstrable reality even when they were first rolled out, as was the case with the aborted OSHA mandate.

OSHA Emergency Temporary Standard On COVID Vaccinations Contradicts Reality

Yet as the one remaining set of mandates impacting American workers—specifically, healthcare workers—inoculation mandates are also a large and growing barrier to health care delivery, and a hidden but growing costs for several aspects of healthcare.

From the beginning, inoculation mandates for health care workers have exacerbated already significant staffing shortages.

As soon as inoculation mandates began to be rolled out at the state and national level, hospitals such as Lewis County General Hospital were forced to suspend medical services due the number of nurses who refused to get inoculated even at the expense of their jobs.

Lewis County General Hospital in Lowville, N.Y., announced Friday that it is pausing maternity services later this month because dozens of staff members quit rather than get COVID-19 vaccines.

The hospital will be "unable to safely staff" its maternity department and newborn nursery as of Sept. 25, according to Lewis County Health System CEO Gerald Cayer. He added that other departments in the hospital are at risk as well if workers don't get vaccinated.

Astoundingly, much of the rationale for the mandates was predicated on the absurd contention that there either was no natural immunity against COVID or that it was inferior to that allegedly provided by the mRNA inoculations.

Officials at Advocate Aurora said they are mandating vaccines for their employees to protect their staff, community and patients.

Mary Beth Kingston, chief nursing officer for Aurora, said naturally occurring antibodies do not provide as strong of an immunity to COVID-19 as the vaccine does and said some patients are demanding to be treated by vaccinated health care members only.

"Patients are concerned. They come into the hospital, they're vulnerable and a lot of times, they're immuno-suppressed, so they voice their concern about having vaccinated health members and providers," Kingston said.

The lunacy of this assertion is amply proven by the more than 60 clinical studies worldwide which demonstrate that natural immunity is superior to the inoculations.

Want Protection Against COVID? Get COVID

Nor was immunity strength the only lie that was told about the inoculations.

From the outset, the assertion by the CDC and other agencies has been that the inoculations were “safe”—an assertion many nurses even then questioned.

Many worried about unknown long-term side effects of the vaccine, though the CDC said any serious side effects that could cause long-term health problems are extremely unlikely.

That the inoculations are safe is still the official policy of the American Hospital Association, which supports inoculation mandates.

Even the CDC continues to tout the inoculations as “safe”.

The CDC’s position is particularly perverse, because the CDC also is the originator of safety analyses which show literally hundreds of “safety signals” indicating there are quite a few safety concerns surrounding the inoculations.

The CDC Lied

The empirical data and research evidence is unambiguous: the mRNA inoculations are neither safe nor effective. The same is therefore obviously true of inoculation mandates.

Yet the inoculation mandates persist, and because they persist they continue to harm healthcare delivery by keeping qualified personnel out of the healthcare workforce.

The impact of inoculation mandates is blunt and simple: Because of inoculation mandates, healthcare workers who do not wish to be inoculated have to choose between being inoculated against their will and working or not being inoculated against their will and not working.

Because a number of healthcare workers refuse to be inoculated against their will, healthcare facilities across the country continue to face critical shortages of healthcare workers.

It’s hard to find workers willing to be vaccinated, Corbin said, because many local residents remain opposed to the vaccine or doubt its effectiveness. Just 42% of adults in St. Clair County are vaccinated against COVID-19 — a rate barely half the national average.

The 120-bed facility is operating at half capacity and turning potential residents away, “because I can’t hire enough people to take care of them,” said Corbin, who’s been running ads touting a $5,000 signing bonus for nurses.

Exacerbated staffing shortages were an immediate impact of the healthcare inoculation mandates, and they remain a lingering legacy of the healthcare inoculation mandates.

By far the most intrusive of the inoculation mandates is the one imposed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Because virtually all hospitals and healthcare facilities in the United States accept patients whose health care coverage is through Medicare and Medicaid, the CMS inoculation mandate is the one which impact every community in every county in every state in the Union.

Moreover, given the deference local public health officials have routinely shown the federal agencies with regards to COVID policies, the continued existence of the CMS mandate is almost certainly a significant factor in the continuation of existing state level mandates.

Los Angeles: The Mask Mandate Lives

These realities make the CMS inoculation mandate by far the most obnoxious of them all. That obnoxiousness is compounded by the fundamental reality that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid do not have statutory authority to impose such a mandate.

The CMS inoculation mandate came into existence on November 5, 2021, when the rule¹ was published in the Federal Register. The rule specifically required healthcare workers in hospitals and facilities participating in the Medicare and Medicaid programs to be inoculated.

In light of our responsibility to protect the health and safety of individuals providing and receiving care and services from for Medicare- and Medicaid-certified providers and suppliers, and CMS's broad statutory authority to establish health and safety regulations, we are compelled to require staff vaccinations for COVID-19 in these settings. For these reasons, we are issuing this IFC based on these authorities and in accordance with established rule making processes. Specifically, sections 1102 and 1871 of the Social Security Act (the Act) grant the Secretary of Health and Human Services authority to make and publish such rules and regulations, not inconsistent with the Act, as may be necessary to the efficient administration of the functions with which the Secretary is charged under this Act and as may be necessary to carry out the administration of the insurance programs under the Act. The discussions of the provider- and supplier-specific provisions in section II. of this IFC set out the specific authorities for each provider or supplier type. Provider and supplier compliance with the Federal rules issued under these statutory authorities are mandatory for participation in the Medicare and Medicaid programs.

Section 1102² authorizes the Secretaries of the Treasury, Labor, and Health and Human Services to enact regulations regarding the general administration of Medicare and Medicaid systems and facilities.

The Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Labor, and the Secretary of Health and Human Services, respectively, shall make and publish such rules and regulations, not inconsistent with this chapter, as may be necessary to the efficient administration of the functions with which each is charged under this chapter.

Section 1871³ applies to regulations regarding the administration of the insurance aspects of Medicare and Medicaid.

The Secretary shall prescribe such regulations as may be necessary to carry out the administration of the insurance programs under this subchapter. When used in this subchapter, the term “regulations” means, unless the context otherwise requires, regulations prescribed by the Secretary.

Soon after, a number states filed suit to block the implementation of the rule, which ended up in the US Supreme Court as Biden v Missouri⁴.

In a rare per curiam (Latin for "by the court") decision, the Supreme Court upheld the validity of the rule, with the Court ruling that the HHS Secretary was explicitly empowered to enact such a rule by statutes cited above.

The Medicare program provides health insurance to individuals 65 and older, as well as those with specified disabilities. The Medicaid program does the same for those with low incomes. Both Medicare and Medicaid are administered by the Secretary of Health and Human Services, who has general statutory authority to promulgate regulations “as may be necessary to the efficient administration of the functions with which [he] is charged.” 42 U. S. C. §1302(a).

However, several justices dissented from the Court’s ruling, with Justice Thomas⁵ in particular noting that the authorities cited by the government did not extend and should not be extended to include the authority to impose unwanted medical procedures.

The Government has not established that either provision empowers it to impose a vaccine mandate. Rules carrying out the “administration” of Medicare and Medicaid are those that serve “the practical management and direction” of those programs. Black’s Law Dictionary 58 (3d ed. 1933). Such rules are “necessary” to “administration” if they bear “an actual and discernible nexus” to the programs’ practical management. Merck & Co., Inc. v. United States Dept. of Health and Human Servs., 962 F.3d 531, 537–538 (CADC 2020) (internal quotation marks omitted). Here, the omnibus rule compels millions of healthcare workers to undergo an unwanted medical procedure that “cannot be removed at the end of the shift,” In re MCP No. 165, 20 F. 4th 264, 268 (CA6 2021) (Sutton, C. J., dissenting from denial of initial hearing en banc). To the extent the rule has any connection to the management of Medicare and Medicaid, it is at most a “tangential” one. Merck & Co., Inc., 962 F. 3d, at 538.

Thomas’ reasoning is instructive, because the rule itself asserts a policy position that the inoculations are “safe and effective.”:

It is essential to reduce the transmission and spread of COVID-19, and vaccination is central to any multi-pronged approach for reducing health system burden, safeguarding health care workers and the people they serve, and ending the COVID-19 pandemic. Currently FDA-approved and FDA-authorized vaccines in use in the U.S. are both safe and highly effective at protecting vaccinated people against symptomatic and severe COVID-19.

If the mRNA inoculations truly were “safe and effective”—which they demonstrably are not—then the reliance on 42 USC §1302(a) as the authority to impose the rule becomes a question of how substantive a connection to the statute must there be in order for that authority to be sustained. As the text of both the per curiam opinion and the Thomas dissent elucidate, the authority in question is one of “practical management”; because no practical management goal can be accomplished through the imposition of toxic and dangerous inoculations, the legitimacy of using 42 USC §1302(a) even by the majority ruling rests entirely on the inoculations’ presumed safety and efficacy, which was debatable even then and is disproven now.

There is no statutory authority for CMS to demand inoculation with toxic and deadly substances, which the mRNA COVID shots unequivocally are.

Moreover, even in the Supreme Court case which validated state level vaccine mandates, Jacobson v. Massachusetts⁶, the Court explicitly inferred that issues of safety would be sufficient to invalidate even a state level mandate.

Before closing this opinion, we deem it appropriate, in order to prevent misapprehension as to our views, to observe -- perhaps to repeat a thought already sufficiently expressed, namely -- that the police power of a State, whether exercised by the legislature or by a local body acting under its authority, may be exerted in such circumstances or by regulations so arbitrary and oppressive in particular cases as to justify the interference of the courts to prevent wrong and oppression. Extreme cases can be readily suggested. Ordinarily such cases are not safe guides in the administration of the law. It is easy, for instance, to suppose the case of an adult who is embraced by the mere words of the act, but yet to subject whom to vaccination in a particular condition of his health or body, would be cruel and inhuman in the last degree. We are not to be understood as holding that the statute was intended to be applied to such a case, or, if it as so intended, that the judiciary would not be competent to interfere and protect the health and life of the individual concerned.

Given that the entire validity of the CMS mandate in particular rests upon the presumed safety and efficacy of the mRNA inoculations, and given that the mRNA inoculations have been proven time and again to be neither safe nor effective, but rather toxic and deadly, there ultimately is no operative ruling or precedent of the Supreme Court which sustains the mandate as a lawful exercise of government power⁷.

There is no fact-based reading of either statute or Supreme Court ruling which can sustain the CMS inoculation mandate as a lawful exercise of government power, and it is in fact yet another example of a lawless exercise of government power.

Yet this lawless exercise of government power has prevailed, and, perversely, will prevail long after the emergency declaration which occasioned it has passed into history.

This lawless exercise of government power has not preserved life nor facilitated healthcare. Rather, it has impeded the effective delivery of healthcare by exacerbating already significant and even severe staffing shortages. It has resulted in less care and more cost. If there was anyone within the US healthcare system that did not realize this consequence of unwarranted government intrusion, if they have been paying attention they realize it now.

The enduring legacy of the CMS inoculation mandate will be this harsh lesson of how badly things can go wrong when government strays beyond its lawful scope of authority. Government out of control of the people is invariably bad, harmful, and expensive government.

1. 86 FR 61555.

2. 42 U.S.C. §1302(a)

3. 42 U.S.C §1395hh

4. Biden v. Missouri, 595 U.S. ___ (2022)

5. Thomas, Clarence. Dissenting Opinion, Biden v. Missouri, 595 U.S. ___ (2022).

6. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905)

7. The Constitutional legitimacy of Medicare and Medicaid themselves, and indeed the whole behemoth that the various elements of Social Security have become, is a separate question, which, for reasons of space, I do not explore here.