Covid-19
COVID vaccine mandate policies now obsolete – experts
Experts have questioned the U.S vaccine mandates strategy, noting that the scientific basis for the vaccine mandate policies are now obsolete because it has no effect on the Omicron mutations of the virus.
U.S lawmakers during the week attacked what some called the Biden administration’s “confusing” messaging and disastrous rollout of COVID booster shots.
In a Senate Health Committee hearing Tuesday, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), the ranking Republican, blasted the Biden administration for failing to coordinate policy on testing, boosters and quarantine recommendations, even as medical and legal experts questioned the legitimacy of Biden’s COVID vaccine mandates.
READ ALSO: Time to treat COVID like common flu, Spain’s leader tells EU
“This administration has time and again squandered its opportunities and made things worse in the decisions you’ve made on testing and treatments and most crucially in communicating with the American people,” Burr said.
The Biden administration on Tuesday announced new rules to begin Feb. 15 requiring all unvaccinated federal health employees to be tested weekly.
This decision comes despite mounting evidence vaccination itself has little to no effect on transmission of the Omicron variant.
According to Dr. Luc Montagnier, Nobel Prize laureate in 2008 for discovering the human immunodeficiency virus, Omicron’s 50 mutations are known to evade antibody protection, because more than 30 of those mutations are to the spike protein used as an immunogen by the existing vaccines, and because there have been mass Omicron outbreaks in heavily vaccinated populations, scientists are highly uncertain the existing vaccines can stop it from spreading.
READ ALSO: COVID vaccine offers limited protection, Pfizer CEO reveals
Montagnier and his co-author, Jed Rubenfeld in an article in Wall Street Journal, said the scientific basis for the administration’s vaccine mandate policies are now obsolete since the legal standard can no longer be met.
That standard, enunciated by the U.S. Supreme Court in Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905), establishes that the right to refuse medical treatment can be overcome only if society needs to curb the spread of a contagious epidemic.
For Omicron, said the authors, “there is as yet no such evidence” the vaccines curb the spread.
