The battle over President Biden’s vaccine-or-testing requirement for large employers is in full swing, with a federal court halting it over the weekend.
And ever since the policy was announced, its Republican opponents have argued not just that it went too far, but that it was hypocritical. Biden as a candidate and president-elect said broadly that he wouldn’t mandate vaccines, and his White House later said there wouldn’t be a nationwide mandate, the critics note.
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The claims, as with much of the pushback on Biden’s policy, ignore plenty of context. Mostly, they continue to ignore that Biden’s policy isn’t strictly a vaccine mandate for the vast majority of people involved. (It also provides a weekly testing option.) The claims also ignore that Biden and others indeed suggested long ago that narrower requirements for people like health-care workers were on the table, even as they downplayed the kind of nationwide mandate that they still haven’t actually pursued.
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Republicans have been all over this for months. In September, the Republican National Committee sent a news release stating: “Biden promised no mandate. He lied.” The GOP has run an ad specifically going after Anthony S. Fauci, clipping his past comments on the issue. In a news release from 41 Republican senators opposing the policy earlier this month, Sen. Ron Johnson (Wis.) stated, “As president-elect, Biden said on vaccines, ‘I don’t think it should be mandatory, I wouldn’t demand it be mandatory.’ Yet, now he has.”
Let’s start by parsing that comment, and run through the others that have been cited as well.
Biden in December 2020: “No, I don’t think they should be mandatory. I wouldn’t demand it to be mandatory.”
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This is from a news conference after Biden’s election, and it might be the most-cited comment from Biden.
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It’s true that Biden has now mandated the vaccine for federal government employees and contractors, as well as health-care workers at facilities participating in Medicare and Medicaid. The question, though, was broad in a way that suggested it might have been interpreted as some kind of nationwide mandate.
The policy currently at issue includes a strict vaccine requirement for those health-care workers (about 17 million of the people affected, according to the White House). But the vast majority it impacts are employees of businesses with at least 100 workers (an estimated 84 million people) who still have the testing option — and thus don’t have to be vaccinated. This policy has often wrongly been cast as a vaccine requirement for all of those 100 million people.
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And indeed, even before this, Biden and others who have been accused of hypocrisy reserved the option to pursue targeted requirements — including for those very same health-care workers and others.
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As the following shows.
Biden in October 2020: “You can’t say, ‘Everyone has to do this.’ ”
One of the earliest instances of Biden being asked about vaccine mandates came at this ABC News town hall during the 2020 campaign.
And if you look beyond the quote above in bold, here was Biden saying explicitly that requiring the vaccine in certain ways was indeed on the table:
Q: Once we get it, if it is safe, if it is effective, will you mandate its use?
BIDEN: ... I would think that we should be talking about -- depending on the continuation of the spread of the virus, we should be thinking about making it mandatory.
Q: How could you enforce that?
BIDEN: Well, you couldn’t. That’s the problem -- just like you can’t enforce measles [vaccinations]. You can’t come to school until you have a measles shot. You can’t. But you can’t say, “Everyone has to do this.”
In other words, Biden said you can’t strictly require a vaccine for everyone, but you can make it a requirement for things like access to public schools. This is akin to the policy for health-care workers and federal government employees and contractors.
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It also reinforces the idea that what Biden said two months later, in December, was speaking broadly about mandating the vaccine for everyone, nationwide.
Biden isn’t the only one to have previewed such targeted and more legal and practical mandates before; so too has another supposed hypocrite, Fauci.
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Fauci in August 2020: “You don’t want to mandate and try and force anyone to take a vaccine. We’ve never done that. … It would be unenforceable and not appropriate.”
This is perhaps the most-cited Fauci quote. It came from an event at George Washington University.
What is often left out is what else Fauci said. “You can mandate for certain groups of people like health workers,” he said, “but for the general population you can’t.”
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This is also very much line with Biden’s policy from a year later. Again, comments about a nationwide mandate are being cast as ruling out more-targeted mandates, but even in these comments, Fauci said more targeted mandates — and specifically the one Biden has now pursued — were in play.
Fauci in July 2020: “I don’t think we’ve ever had a situation where you mandated for the general population. … I don’t see it on a national level, merely because of all the situations you have encroaching upon a person’s freedom to make their own choice of their own health.”
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This is another illustration of how Fauci’s words have been oversimplified to suggest he ruled out any mandates.
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In the same comments, Fauci noted that he, as a doctor in the federal government, has been mandated to get the flu vaccine to see his patients.
Again, the line here seems to be whether there would be a mandate “on a national level.” And there remains no mandate for “the general population.”
Jen Psaki in May and July 2021: “We are not currently considering federal mandates.” And, “That’s not the role of the federal government; that is the role that institutions, private-sector entities and others may take.”
The first comment is also a popular one; what’s often left out is that the question wasn’t about mandating the vaccine, but rather federal vaccine passports, which the Biden administration still hasn’t pursued. Even as Psaki’s comment could be read to more broadly include vaccination mandates, it merely said such an idea was not being “currently considered.”
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The second was more specifically about actual vaccine mandates. And this one is more compelling than most of the comments above. Again, the question is whether this was interpreted as being about broader nationwide mandates and whether it actually ruled out future, more-targeted mandates.
And there’s plenty around this exact time — even the same month — to suggest more targeted ones were indeed on the table.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky in July 2021: “There will be no nationwide mandate.”
Shortly after Psaki’s comments, Walensky caused a stir by saying on Fox News that federal mandates were “something that I think the administration is looking into.” She repeated that “we’re looking into those policies.”
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Walensky soon clarified that, again, the line was between some kind of broad nationwide mandate, and more targeted ones.
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“There will be no nationwide mandate,” she tweeted. “I was referring to mandates by private institutions and portions of the federal government. There will be no federal mandate.”
The RNC, in accusing Walensky and the administration of hypocrisy and lying about mandates, quoted the Walensky tweet above, while excising the part about potential mandates for “portions of the federal government.”
White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre added in a briefing that “a national vaccine requirement is not under consideration at this time.”
And it still hasn’t been pursued. What has been pursued are the kind of more-targeted requirements that Walensky talked about (for the federal government), Fauci suggested could be in play as far back as the summer of 2020 (for health-care workers) and that Biden himself talked about even on the eve of the 2020 election.
Indeed, those Biden comments at the time led some to criticize him for leaning too much toward vaccine mandates. Now the same comments and its contemporaries are being pitched as him somehow having ruled out mandates and having reversed course.