On Thursday, Chairman of the House Education & Workforce Protections Subcommittee, Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-CA) grilled Douglas Parker of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) on the government's COVID vaccine mandates, which forced thousands of federal, state, and private sector employees to either get vaccinated or lose their jobs.
These mandates upended lives, and those who refused to get vaccinated, whether for medical or religious reasons, had their careers and livelihoods decimated. However, now that Congress is digging into the federal government's handling of the COVID pandemic, our government is doing all it can to deny that they forced anyone to do anything and that no mandates existed. This, despite the fact that there are documents, news reports, and video footage of President Biden himself issuing the directives, and complicit cabinet members like Parker seeing they were carried out.
The beauty of having California's Kevin Kiley in Congress is that as a former member of the California Assembly, he has intimate knowledge of the malfeasance of people like Julie Su and Parker when they headed California's agencies. So, no matter how much these failures attempt to obfuscate and deny their knowledge or involvement, Kiley has kept copious receipts.
Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Education & the Workforce Committee's Workforce Protections Subcommittee, started the hearing by mentioning that OSHA head Douglas Parker ran California's OSHA office -- also known as Cal OSHA -- during the first 2 years of the COVID-19 pandemic.
"In June 2021, Cal OSHA proposed a rule that employees could go without masks in the workplace if and only if every worker present was vaccinated," said Kiley. "So a single identified unvaccinated employee would cause all employees to have to wear masks ... The rule was so widely criticized that Cal OSHA reversed itself the following week, but still forced employers to collect vaccination information from employees."
"It was indicative of the uncertainty and irrationality that marked the COVID experience for businesses and workers in the state," he continued, adding that shortly after Parker was sworn into his current position, "OSHA published an emergency rule on workplace COVID-19 vaccination. The rule required employers with a total of 100 or more employees to develop, implement, and enforce a mandatory COVID-19 vaccination policy. Within 2 months, the Supreme Court ruled that OSHA had exceeded its authority in an unprecedented way."
The Biden Administration is rewriting the history of COVID. Today, the head of OSHA claimed "we didn't demand that anyone be fired" despite issuing a worker vaccine mandate for 84 million Americans that was struck down by the Supreme Court.
— Kevin Kiley (@KevinKileyCA) September 27, 2023
Previously, HHS Secretary Becerra… pic.twitter.com/Pi3O8oUgtt
Here's the video with the Cardona clip in the middle fixed. If we let them get away with rewriting history, they won't hesitate to do the same thing again. pic.twitter.com/6Ul7hRwkH8
— Kevin Kiley (@KevinKileyCA) September 29, 2023
As the Congressman penned on his blog:
The Biden Administration is rewriting the history of COVID. Yesterday, the official responsible for the illegal employee vaccine mandate – which targeted 84 million Americans until the Supreme Court struck it down – tried to deny it ever happened.
This came during a hearing I chaired of the Workforce Subcommittee. The official, David Parker, is the head of the “OSHA” agency, which formally enacted Biden’s vaccine mandate in November of 2021. Yet Parker testified: “we didn’t demand anyone be fired.”
RedState did an entire, exclusive series about how Siemens Corporation used the OSHA vaccine mandate as an excuse to cull its ranks and fire even its work-from-home contractors. This is one of many companies that, thanks to Parker and OSHA, chose to bow to an unconstitutional mandate rather than fight for their employees' civil liberties.
Last week, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) also challenged the administration's COVID amnesia surrounding the origins of the COVID-19 virus and the Wuhan lab leak.
GOP lawmakers sent a letter this week to CIA Director William Burns after a whistleblower claimed that analysts probing COVID-19 origins were offered money to alter their stance that the virus likely came from a Wuhan lab leak.
Sens. Rand Paul, R-Ky., Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Rick Scott, R-Fla., and Ron Johnson, R-Wis., joined their House counterparts in demanding answers from Burns, such as all of the "documents and communications between or among the members of all iterations of the COVID Discovery Team(s) regarding the origins of COVID-19."
Paul told Fox News Digital in a statement Thursday, "This is one of the biggest cover-ups in our nation's history, and we deserve answers."
"Department of Energy scientists concluded COVID-19 came from a lab," Paul wrote. "FBI scientists concluded COVID-19 came from a lab. We've been told six of seven CIA scientists also concluded COVID-19 came from a lab but were paid to change their minds."
Both houses of Congress are working doggedly to ensure that the origins of COVID and all the harms done to the American people because of our government's execution and response to its mitigation are uncovered and accounted for. Kiley described the government's effort to pretend they did not make an end-run around the Constitution, and individual freedoms, as Orwellian.
The concerted effort to rewrite history is telling. It shows we have won the debate. The unthinkable abuses of the COVID era can’t be justified, so the perpetrators are trying to send them down an Orwellian memory hole. Then, they’ll all-too-readily do the same thing again.
In 2022, right around September and October, COVID zealots like Dr. Leana Wen and the legacy media were all over the idea of a "COVID Amnesty." Not more than two days ago, disgraced former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Wen even got their old act together and took it back on the road; as if a record of condemning the unvaccinated and sending the elderly into nursing homes to die never occurred.
Deciphering fact from opinion.
— Andrew Cuomo (@andrewcuomo) September 20, 2023
I spoke with Public Health Educator, @DrLeanaWen, on the latest Covid numbers, pandemic preparedness and more.
You can listen to our conversation now on @ApplePodcasts and @QuakeMedia pic.twitter.com/2UbOTNvB9A
One writer explained why COVID Amnesty is not possible.
I’d be much more sympathetic to this argument if the over-the-top government restrictions and social conformity lasted only until the data began rolling in. But that’s not what happened. Instead, the public was forced to live with school closures, mask mandates, and even draconian vaccine mandates for two years — long after we knew that schools weren’t superspreaders, that cloth masks didn’t work, and that vaccines didn’t stop transmission. Two years of forced social isolation, which kept families from holding funerals and weddings and blocked them from visiting loved ones in the hospital. Two years of back-and-forth restrictions, which crushed businesses and closed churches and did immense developmental damage to children with learning disabilities and special needs.
The damage is too great, the consequences too devastating, for us to move on and put it all behind us — especially since the majority of those responsible for the havoc wrought refuse to apologize for or even acknowledge the harm their policies have done.
So, instead of acknowledging their gross errors and wrongs, the COVID zealots and our federal government actors are going for COVID Amnesia. They just don't remember ever doing all of the things they did, despite the carnage of shuttered businesses, lost resources, handicapped children, and an inflated economy left in their wake.
We should be thankful that Congressman Kiley, Senator Paul, and others are jogging their memories and refusing to let them revise the true COVID history.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member