Employees of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services who are tasked to enforce COVID-19 vaccine mandates on the nation's hospitals and doctors are not required to get the shots, Texas Rep. Brian Harrison, the chief of staff for the Department of Health and Human Services under former President Donald Trump, said on Newsmax on Tuesday.
Quoting a memo he obtained, the Texas Republican told Newsmax's "Wake Up America" that "if you were one of these officials tasked with enforcing their tyrannical COVID vaccine mandate, you can be exempt from the vaccine mandates."
"It turns out if you don't want to have to take a vaccine, just get a job enforcing the vaccine mandate," Harrison said. "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 said he thinks the mandate was lifted for the employees because "they got a taste of their own medicine and had to live for just a few minutes under the same rules" to which the agency has subjected millions of Americans.
"They mandated it for their own enforcers that people that do these inspections, but they couldn't live with it the second they had to live under the same rules, which is, by the way, the way our government is supposed to be set up," said Harrison. "You live under the rules you make.
"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."
But still, "if you're a doctor or nurse who had to live under these rules, and you lost your job, you lost your ability to provide for your family, or you're a small business that had to declare bankruptcy or had to lay people off," said Harrison.
He said he thinks back to Obamacare when Congress exempted itself from the insurance requirements but called the current situation "far worse than that."
"At least Congress passed Obamacare," said Harrison. "No Congress passed this vaccine mandate. We had the executive branch and the Biden administration acting like totalitarians. They're both writing laws and they're enforcing them. These mandates have got to go."
Harrison has presented the Texas COVID Vaccine Freedom Act, and on Tuesday he called on Republicans on the federal level, who he thinks will retake Congress, to undertake in their first action moves to "defund a government that enforces these types of tyrannical mandates on millions of Americans, especially given that no congressman or senator voted on it."
Lawmakers in states must also "show up" and "assert their authority under the 10th Amendment," said Harrison.
"It's absolutely the pro-liberty position to take," said Harrison. "If you can have a government far off away in Washington, D.C., telling my constituents ― I proudly represent 200,000 Texans ― Washington, D.C., can force needles into the arms of Texans or any American against their will, we might as well give up any pretense of having a federalist system. We are clearly moving into a post-constitutional era. "
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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