Report Shows Politics Trumped Science on U.S. Vaccine Mandates

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

If you thought responsible science drove the bus on the pandemic response, think again. A December 2024 report by the U.S. House of Representatives Select Subcommittee, Coronavirus Pandemic shows that political agendas made regulatory bodies rush vaccine approvals, mandates, and boosters, causing public distrust.

“After Action Review of the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Lessons Learned and a Path Forward” praised the Trump administration’s efforts to speed up vaccine development. By contrast, the report said presidential candidate Joe Biden and vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris undermined public confidence.

“[W]hy do we think the public is gonna line up to be willing to take the injection?” Joe Biden asked on September 5, 2020. This quote appeared in a Politico article titled “Harris says she wouldn’t trust Trump on any vaccine released before [the] election.”

The House report noted, “These irresponsible statements eventually proved to be outright hypocrisy less than a year later when the Biden-Harris Administration began to boldly decry all individuals who decided to forgo COVID-19 vaccinations for personal, religious, or medical reasons.”

Millions of doses of COVID-19 vaccines were administered beginning in December 2020 under an Emergency Use Authorization. This mechanism allows unapproved medical products to be used in emergency situations under certain criteria, including that there are no alternatives. The only previous EUA was for the 2004 anthrax vaccine, which was only administered to a narrow group of people.

By the time vaccines rolled out, SARS-CoV-2 had already infected 91 million Americans. The original SARS virus some 15 years prior showed that people who recovered had lasting immunity. Later, a January 2021 study of 200 participants by the La Jolla Institute of Immunology found 95 per cent of people who had contracted SARS-CoV-2 (the virus behind COVID-19) had lasting immune responses. A February 16, 2023 article by Caroline Stein in The Lancet (updated March 11, 2023) showed that contracting COVID-19 provided an immune response that was as good or better than two COVID-19 shots.

Correspondence suggests that part of the motivation for full (and not just emergency) vaccine approval was to facilitate vaccine mandates. A July 21, 2021, email from Dr. Marion Gruber, then director of vaccine reviews for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), recalled that Dr. Janet Woodcock had stated that “absent a license, states cannot require mandatory vaccination.” Woodcock was the FDA’s Principal Deputy Commissioner at the time.

Sure enough, the FDA granted full vaccine approval on August 23, 2021, more than four months sooner than a normal priority process would take. Yet, five days prior, Biden made an announcement that put pressure on regulators.

On August 18, 2021, Biden announced that all Americans would have booster shots available starting the week of September 20, pending final evaluation from the FDA and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Some decision-makers objected. Dr. Marion Gruber and fellow FDA deputy director of vaccine research Dr. Philip Krause had concerns regarding the hasty timelines for approving Pfizer’s primary shots and boosters. On August 31, 2021, they announced their retirements.

According to a contemporary New York Times article, Krause and Gruber were upset about Biden’s booster announcement. The article said that “neither believed there was enough data to justify offering booster shots yet,” and that they “viewed the announcement, amplified by President Biden, as pressure on the F.D.A. to quickly authorize them.”

In The Lancet on September 13, 2021, Gruber, Krause, and 16 other scientists warned that mass boosting risked triggering myocarditis (heart inflammation) for little benefit.

“[W]idespread boosting should be undertaken only if there is clear evidence that it is appropriate,” the authors wrote. “Current evidence does not, therefore, appear to show a need for boosting in the general population, in which efficacy against severe disease remains high.”

Regardless, approval for the boosters arrived on schedule on September 24, 2021. CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky granted this approval, but for a wider population than recommended by her advisory panel. This was only the second time in CDC history that a director had defied panel advice.

“[T]his process may have been tainted with political pressure,” the House report found.

Amidst all this, the vaccines were fully licensed. The FDA licensed the Comirnaty (Pfizer-BioNTech) vaccine on August 23, 2021. The very next day, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin issued a memo announcing a vaccine mandate for the military. Four other federal mandates followed.

“[T]he public’s perception [is] that these vaccines were approved in a hurry to satisfy a political agenda,” the House report found.

The House report condemned the dubious process and basis for these mandates. It said the mandates “ignored natural immunity, … risk of adverse events from the vaccine, as well as the fact that the vaccines don’t prevent the spread of COVID-19.”

The mandates robbed people of their livelihoods, “hollowed out our healthcare and education workforces, reduced our military readiness and recruitment, caused vaccine hesitancy, reduced trust in public health, trampled individual freedoms, deepened political divisions, and interfered in the patient-physician relationship,” the report continued.

The same could be said of Canadian vaccine mandates, as shown by the National Citizen’s Inquiry hearings on COVID-19. Unfortunately, an official federal investigation and a resulting acknowledgement do not seem forthcoming. Politicized mandates led to profits for vaccine manufacturers but left “science” with a sullied reputation.

Lee Harding is a Research Fellow for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

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University of Colorado will pay $10 million to staff, students for trying to force them to take COVID shots

Published on December 4, 2025

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From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

The University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine caused ‘life-altering damage’ to Catholics and other religious groups by denying them exemptions to its COVID shot mandate, and now the school must pay a hefty settlement.

The University of Colorado’s Anschutz School of Medicine must pay more than $10.3 million to 18 plaintiffs it attempted to force into taking COVID-19 shots despite religious objections, in a settlement announced by the religious liberty law firm the Thomas More Society.

As previously covered by LifeSiteNews, in April 2021, the University of Colorado (UC) announced its requirement that all staff and students receive COVID jabs, leaving specific policy details to individual campuses. On September 1, 2021, it enforced an updated policy stating that “religious exemption may be submitted based on a person’s religious belief whose teachings are opposed to all immunizations,” but required not only a written explanation why one’s “sincerely held religious belief, practice of observance prevents them” from taking the jabs, but also whether they “had an influenza or other vaccine in the past.”

On September 24, the policy was revised to stating that “religious accommodation may be granted based on an employee’s religious beliefs,” but “will not be granted if the accommodation would unduly burden the health and safety of other Individuals, patients, or the campus community.”

In practice, the school denied religious exemptions to Catholic, Buddhist, Eastern Orthodox, Evangelical, Protestant, and other applicants, most represented by Thomas More in a lawsuit contending that administrators “rejected any application for a religious exemption unless an applicant could convince the Administration that her religion ‘teaches (them) and all other adherents that immunizations are forbidden under all circumstances.’”

The UC system dropped the mandate in May 2023, but the harm had been done to those denied exemptions while it was in effect, including unpaid leave, eventual firing, being forced into remote work, and pay cuts.

In May 2024, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals rebuked the school for denying the accommodations. Writing for the majority, Judge Allison Eid found that a “government employer may not punish some employees, but not others, for the same activity, due only to differences in the employee’s religious beliefs.”

Now, Thomas More announces that year-long settlement negotiations have finally secured the aforementioned hefty settlement for their clients, covering damages, tuition costs, and attorney’s fees. It also ensured the UC will agree to allow and consider religious accommodation requests on an equal basis to medical exemption requests and abstain from probing the validity of applicants’ religious beliefs in the future.

“No amount of compensation or course-correction can make up for the life-altering damage Chancellor Elliman and Anschutz inflicted on the plaintiffs and so many others throughout this case, who felt forced to succumb to a manifestly irrational mandate,” declared senior Thomas More attorney Michael McHale. “At great, and sometimes career-ending, costs, our heroic clients fought for the First Amendment freedoms of all Americans who were put to the unconscionable choice of their livelihoods or their faith during what Justice Gorsuch has rightly declared one of ‘the greatest intrusion[s] on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.’ We are confident our clients’ long-overdue victory indeed confirms, despite the tyrannical efforts of many, that our shared constitutional right to religious liberty endures.”

On top of the numerous serious adverse medical events that have been linked to the COVID shots and their demonstrated ineffectiveness at reducing symptoms or transmission of the virus, many religious and pro-life Americans also object to the shots on moral grounds, due to the ethics of how they were developed.

Catholic World Report notes that similarly large sums have been won in other high-profile lawsuits against COVID shot mandates, including $10.3 million to more than 500 NorthShore University HealthSystem employees in 2022 and $12.7 million to a Catholic Michigander fired by Blue Cross Blue Shield in 2024.

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The dangers of mRNA vaccines explained by Dr. John Campbell

Published on November 30, 2025

Todayville

From the YouTube channel of Dr John Campbell

There aren’t many people as good at explaining complex medical situations at Dr. John Campbell. That’s probably because this British Health Researcher spent his career teaching medicine to nurses.

Over the last number of years, Campbell has garnered an audience of millions of regular people who want to understand various aspects of the world of medical treatment.

In this important video Campbell explains how the new mRNA platform of vaccines can cause very serious health outcomes.

Dr. Campbell’s notes for this video:

Excess Deaths in the United Kingdom: Midazolam and Euthanasia in the COVID-19 Pandemic https://www.researchgate.net/publicat… Macro-data during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom (UK) are shown to have significant data anomalies and inconsistencies with existing explanations. This paper shows that the UK spike in deaths, wrongly attributed to COVID-19 in April 2020, was not due to SARS-CoV-2 virus, which was largely absent, but was due to the widespread use of Midazolam injections, which were statistically very highly correlated (coefficient over 90%) with excess deaths in all regions of England during 2020. Importantly, excess deaths remained elevated following mass vaccination in 2021, but were statistically uncorrelated to COVID injections, while remaining significantly correlated to Midazolam injections. The widespread and persistent use of Midazolam in UK suggests a possible policy of systemic euthanasia. Unlike Australia, where assessing the statistical impact of COVID injections on excess deaths is relatively straightforward, UK excess deaths were closely associated with the use of Midazolam and other medical intervention. The iatrogenic pandemic in the UK was caused by euthanasia deaths from Midazolam and also, likely caused by COVID injections, but their relative impacts are difficult to measure from the data, due to causal proximity of euthanasia. Global investigations of COVID-19 epidemiology, based only on the relative impacts of COVID disease and vaccination, may be inaccurate, due to the neglect of significant confounding factors in some countries. Graphs April 2020, 98.8% increase 43,796 January 2021, 29.2% increase 16,546 Therefore covid is very dangerous, This interpretation, which is disputable, justified politically the declaration of emergency and all public health measures, including masking, lockdowns, etc. Excess deaths and erroneous conclusions 2020, 76,000 2021, 54,000 2022, 45,000 This evidence of “vaccine effectiveness” was illusory, due to incorrect attribution of the 2020 death spike. PS Despite advances in modern information technology, the accuracy of data collection has not advanced in the United Kingdom for over 150 years, because the same problems of erroneous data entry found then are still found now in the COVID pandemic, not only in the UK but all over the world. We have independently discovered the same UK data problem and solution for assessing COVID-19 vaccination as Alfred Russel Wallace had 150 years ago in investigating the consequences of Vaccination Acts starting in 1840 on smallpox: The Alfred Russel Wallace as used by Wilson Sy “Having thus cleared away the mass of doubtful or erroneous statistics, depending on comparisons of the vaccinated and unvaccinated in limited areas or selected groups of patients, we turn to the only really important evidence, those ‘masses of national experience’…” https://archive.org/details/b21356336… Alfred Russel Wallace, 1880s–1890s 1840 Vaccination Act Provided free smallpox vaccination to the poor Banned variolation Vaccination compulsory in 1853, 1867 Why his interest? C 1885 The Leicester Anti-Vaccination demonstrations (1885) Growing public resistance to compulsory vaccination Wallace’s increasing involvement in social reform and statistical arguments Statistical critique of vaccination Government data on: Smallpox mortality trends before and after compulsory vaccination Case mortality rates Vaccination vs. sanitation effects Mortality trends before and after each Act, 1853 and 1867 “Forty-Five Years of Registration Statistics, Proving Vaccination to Be Both Useless and Dangerous” (1885) “Vaccination a Delusion; Its Penal Enforcement a Crime” (1898) Contributions to the Royal Commission on Vaccination (1890–1896) Wallace argued: Declining smallpox mortality was due to improved sanitation, not vaccination Official statistics were misinterpreted or biased Compulsory vaccination was unjust Re-vaccination did not reliably prevent outbreaks These views were strongly disputed, then and now. Wallace had a strong distrust of medical authority He and believed in: Statistical reasoning Social reform Opposition to coercive government measures The primacy of environmental and sanitary conditions in health