DATE POSTED: August 21, 2023.

On July 27, 2023, RIM team members returned to the Rayburn Building on Capitol Hill to attend a second subcommittee hearing, this time on vaccine mandates. If the hearing we attended in May managed to carve out some room for bipartisan agreement about the negligent “must admit” policy that resulted in thousands of nursing homes deaths, this hearing was poised from the outset to exploit divisions in how the two parties viewed public health regulations. The Republican members signaled their skepticism and bias with the hearing’s title: “Because I Said So: Examining the Science and Impact of COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates.” The hearing addressed the efficacy of the vaccine in terms of its ability to prevent the virus’s transmission, and highlighted how differently both parties approached public health, and which types of expertise they each valued.

We took note of the witnesses invited to testify by each party. As the Majority party, the Republican members are able to invite three witnesses, while the Minority Democrats are only allowed one. The Republicans had called on Dr. Kevin Bardosh as their primary “expert.” An affiliate assistant professor at the University of Washington, Dr. Bardosh had published research papers opposing vaccine mandates, which he summarized in in his written testimony, “Our analysis strongly suggests that mandatory COVID-19 vaccine policies have had damaging effects on public trust, human rights, inequities and social wellbeing.” Bardosh emphasized that, though vaccines saved lives, his research supported the belief that the mandates did more harm than good. Throughout the hearing, most of the Republican committee members only asked questions aimed at Bardosh, passing over their other two witnesses.

The Minority witness was Dr. John Lynch, a Professor of Medicine at the University of Washington, as well as Associate Medical Director of the Harborview Medical Center and Co-Director of the Center for Stewardship in Medicine. Throughout his testimony, Lynch highlighted both the safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine and booster and emphasized their positive effects on the healthcare response to the pandemic. Taking note of the COVID-19 mandates that became the subject of the hearing, in his written testimony he explained, “When the COVID-19 vaccines were first made available, there were extremely compelling reasons to boost vaccination rates quickly, which caused many health care professional societies to support policies requiring vaccination… COVID-19 vaccines were a strong tool in preventing COVID-19 transmission because, prior to the Delta variant, the vaccines offered incredibly powerful protection against infection. Reducing transmission could limit the development of more dangerous variants, ease pressure on extremely overwhelmed health care facilities and save lives.” Lynch went on to make policy recommendations for increasing communication and public trust around vaccines, though these unfortunately went largely ignored by the Majority during the hearing.

Chairman Brad Wenstrup during his opening remarks. Photo by RIM.

In his opening salvo, Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) framed the debate in terms of the federal government’s violation of the “sacred relationship” between doctors and patients: “The Biden Administration inserted itself and defiled this sacred relationship that we as Americans have always treasured between the doctor and the patient” (min. 28:15). Americans, he argued, “want to be educated, not indoctrinated” (min. 26:30).

Ranking member Raul Ruiz (D-CA) immediately went on the offensive with his opening remarks, chastising his Republican colleagues for continuing to traffic in misinformation related to COVID vaccines: “Just last week the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government held a hearing with a vocal vaccine skeptic and known purveyor of medical misinformation, amplifying his dangerous views for all the world to see. And now here we are one week later holding a hearing with verbiage that continues to undermine confidence in life-saving vaccines and call into question the science and policies behind the greatest tool we have in public health to protect against infectious diseases” (min. 33:10). Because of the vaccine and the Biden administration’s efforts to increase supply and access, he argued, “we were able to prevent the loss of another 3.2 million American lives, keep another 18.5 million people out of the hospital, and save our economy over one trillion dollars in medical costs” (min. 35:10).

From there, various representatives on the subcommittee cycled into the hearing room throughout the next two hours. The proceedings were a little chaotic, and often the dais was almost empty: a vote was going on at the same time, so most of the representatives did not attend the entire hearing, and several did not attend at all. As each joined the hearing, they delivered their remarks, occasionally asking questions of the assembled witnesses to further their points.

The majority witness testimony and Republican remarks repeatedly invoked the violation of Americans’ “bodily autonomy,” “freedom,” and “liberty,” with Dr. Bardosh going so far as to liken the federal mandates to a form of enslavement: “Let me just end with a personal opinion. May I remind everyone here about the higher law inspired by God in which this country defines Liberty. We consider a deprivation of bodily autonomy to be fundamentally humiliating and associated with a form of mental and physical enslavement. Inherent to human nature is the desire to have self-determination over one’s own body and mind” (min. 54:34).

The fireworks over expertise began in earnest two hours in, during a string of debates between Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), and Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA). Raskin claimed to be “puzzled” and “surprised” by the Republicans’ opposition to vaccine mandates, using historical evidence to back up his claims (testimony starts at min 2:25:05). Echoing Dr. Ruiz’s statement that “three million lives and eighteen million hospitalizations” were prevented by the mandates, he pointed out that vaccine mandates aimed at diseases such as “measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox, and polio” had not been challenged on constitutional grounds, and that COVID-19 vaccine mandates should be treated no differently. He blamed misinformation – especially misinformation spread by former president Donald Trump – for hesitancy and distrust toward public health mandates and institutions.

Rep. Greene, meanwhile, directly challenged the safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine. She held up printed charts of statistics taken from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which she used to support her claims that the vaccine resulted in a significant increase in adverse events and even deaths. She also read aloud an e-mail from a constituent of hers, who stated she was severely adversely affected by the vaccine. “I went from being a charge nurse being on the floor to being a person who cannot remember how to take a shower, who walks like a drunkard and slurs her words.” Rep. Greene’s testimony drew the ire of Rep. Garcia, who refuted her continued use of decontextualized, “unverified” VAERS data as “irresponsible,”e and, as the minority witness and several committee members had before him, argued that “COVID vaccines have saved lives, period,” and that the claims of “conspiracy theorists” attacking the COVID mandates are “dangerous.” He went on to challenge her remarks, displaying a Tweet of hers that compared vaccine mandates to the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust. Though Rep. Greene complained about this, stating that it violated “the rules of decorum” (which Chairman Wenstrup agreed with), Rep. Garcia pushed on to finish his rebuke.

Rep. Garcia displays an incendiary tweet by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Photo by RIM.

Arguably the most explicit exchange over expertise came when Rep. McCormick (R-GA) tangled with the minority witness, Dr. Lynch, regarding whether his (McCormick’s) medical training and experience treating COVID-19 patients in the ER qualified him as an expert on the subject of vaccine mandates (starting at min 2:49:10). “Would you say I’m an expert? … Would you say I’m an expert too …?” he repeatedly pressed Dr. Lynch, whose careful sidestepping (“I have no doubt you have great expertise in ER medicine …. I can’t speak to that … I’m sorry I haven’t reviewed your expertise”), only irritated him further. Visibly annoyed, Rep. McCormick dispensed with his ploy to get the expert to call him an expert and conferred the title on himself anyway, “for argument’s sake.”

“While the idea of equal time for opposing opinions makes sense in a two-party political system, it does not work for science, because science is not about opinion. It is about evidence…”

Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt

In their study of climate science denialism, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (Bloomsbury Press, 2010), Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway show how first the tobacco and then the fossil fuel industry deployed doubt (“doubt-mongering”) to undermine scientific evidence and expertise in service of commercial interests. By providing doubt a national stage—such as a subcommittee hearing on the coronavirus pandemic—its purveyors, they argue, work to legitimize the misinterpretations that derive from doubt’s uncertainties. Shouldn’t skepticism (e.g., the Majority’s skepticism of vaccine efficacy) get a fair hearing, equal playing time? No, they explain. “While the idea of equal time for opposing opinions makes sense in a two-party political system, it does not work for science, because science is not about opinion. It is about evidence. It is about claims that can be, and have been, tested through scientific research— experiments, experience, and observation—research that is then subject to critical review by a jury of scientific peers. Claims that have not gone through that process—or have gone through it and failed—are not scientific and do not deserve equal time in a scientific debate” (p. 32).

The hearing we attended at times felt like a debate between two parallel universes, one invested in highlighting doubt and lamenting the mandates’ costs to civil liberties, the other focused on lives saved by the vaccine. The Rituals in the Making Team has spent three years studying COVID death, mourning, memorialization, and misinformation. We’ve followed—and participated in commemorating—the over 1.3 million deaths to this virus. And so we end by underscoring the scientifically vetted facts (not opinions) listed by Dr. Ruiz, Dr. Lynch, and Rep. Raskin:

The COVID-19 vaccines saved 3.2 million lives and prevented 18.5 million hospitalizations. In short, it prevented incalculable additional mourning and suffering. [See: Meagan C. Fitzpatrick et al., “Two Years of U.S. COVID-19 Vaccines Have Prevented Millions of Hospitalizations and Deaths,” To the Point (blog), Commonwealth Fund, Dec. 13, 2022. https://doi.org/10.26099/whsf-fp90 ]