House panel targets Biden admin over COVID vaccine mandates

A GOP-led House subcommittee is demanding answers about how President Biden’s controversial COVID-19 vaccine mandates came to be.

The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic sent letters Tuesday to the Office of Personnel Management and the departments of Defense, Labor, and Health and Human Services demanding documentation showing how the requirements originated and evolved.

“The Biden Administration disregarded medical freedom, patient-physician relationships, and clear scientific standards to force a novel vaccine on millions of Americans without sufficient evidence to support their policies,” subcommittee Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) told The Post.

Requested information includes material informing the decisions behind the mandates, internal communications about the vaccine, draft versions of the requirements, data about its implementation, and more.

The panel is demanding that information by Aug. 15.

“We are investigating how the mandates came to be to inform Congressional action should there be a future pandemic,” Wenstrup told each of the departments and agencies in the letters.

In September 2021, Biden signed an executive order directing federal employees to receive the COVID-19 vaccine with few exceptions. Businesses with at least 100 workers were told to require staffers to get vaccinated or be tested weekly.

OPM was tasked with tracking down and enforcing the measure across the government.

In early 2022, OSHA withdrew the vaccine-or-test mandate for businesses after the Supreme Court determined it exceeded presidential authority.

HHS’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services imposed a requirement directing Medicare and Medicaid-certified providers to get the jab.

That order was issued in November 2021 and later upheld by the Supreme Court.

Lastly, and perhaps most controversially, the Department of Defense mandated service members, civilian employees and contractors get immunized a day after Pfizer’s vaccine got full approval from the Food and Drug Administration.

Some 17,000 service members had refused the vaccine as of March of this year and about half of them have since been discharged from the military, while thousands of exemption requests are still pending, according to the panel.

“This raises serious concerns regarding the vaccine mandate’s effect on military readiness,” Wenstrup wrote in his letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

More than 1 million Americans are believed to have died from COVID-19, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Biden administration began easing up on its suppression measures as the virus subsided and lifted the national emergency and vaccine mandate for federal workers earlier this year.

Republicans in Congress have long railed against the stringent measures to curtail spread of the highly contagious virus.

“Federal COVID-19 vaccine mandates not only trampled individual liberties but also increased overall vaccine hesitancy,” Wenstrup told The Post. “Investigating how these unscientific policies came to be is a first step towards accountability.”