Bucshon: Vaccine Mandates Must End To Restore Trust In Public Health Leaders

Source: Bill Clark / Getty

WASHINGTON — Trust needs to be restored to the nation’s public health institutions. That’s the feeling of Indiana Congressman Larry Bucshon (R-IN-8th).

As a medical doctor by trade, Bucshon said in a House Commerce committee hearing this week that it’s troubling very few people these days now have trust in institutions like the CDC after what the country went through with the COVID pandemic.

“While I believe most public health officials work in good faith, I also believe that you and your predecessors have at various times have been pressured by your respective White Houses to take certain actions, or make certain statements to achieve political objectives,” Bucshon said to Dr. Rochelle Walensky and other public health leaders called to testify to the committee.

Bucshon, who is vaccinated against COVID, denounced such behavior and asked Walensky to clarify many things about what the CDC’s process was in supporting vaccine mandates beginning with President Biden’s tenure in the White House.

“I strongly believe that any medical decision, medical therapy, is the decision of the individual and not the federal government,” Bucshon said. “Beginning in 2021 vaccine mandates were imposed across the country and as a result of these mandates unvaccinated people were fired from jobs, excluded from education, even denied organ transplants.”

Walensky was able to provide some clarification of what the CDC took into account when it came to vaccine mandates, but was mostly unable to answer many questions due to the amount of time Bucshon had in his line of questioning.

Walensky was able to say by the time the Delta variant of COVID came around the CDC began to realize that COVID vaccines did not prevent transmission of the virus as well as it did with the initial virus as well as the Alpha variant.

Bucshon urged the CDC and other decision-makers to lift federal vaccine mandates still in place such as one for travelers to the U.S. who are not citizens.