On Thursday, lawmakers in the House Oversight Committee’s Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic heard from proponents and opponents of the COVID-19 vaccine mandates, including a fired sports reporter and one of the civil rights attorneys who successfully challenged the U.S. military’s vaccine mandate program.
At the opening of the hearing, Subcommittee Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) said he had been optimistic that the vaccines could help the people of the United States return to a semblance of normalcy after the widespread lockdowns and mask mandates throughout 2020. But, Dr. Wenstrup, a medical doctor and officer in the U.S. Army Reserve, said, “The rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine will be forever tarnished by the Biden Administration’s decision to remove the doctor from the patient-doctor relationship and force COVID vaccines upon everyday Americans, the armed forces, and the federal workforce.”
By contrast, Dr. John Lynch—the witness called by the subcommittee’s Democratic minority—argued that the vaccine mandates had been “one of the most powerful tools to increase vaccine acceptance.”
In his prepared testimony, Dr. Lynch credited the COVID-19 vaccines with reducing hospitalization rates and boosting the economy by reducing the number of work days businesses lost due to sick employees. He also said the vaccines helped improve mental health across society, countering the depression and anxiety that had arisen from lockdowns and isolation by facilitating a return to pre-COVID normalcy.
While Dr. Lynch widely praised the efficacy of the vaccines themselves and the various mandates that compelled more people to take the shots, the other witnesses at Thursday’s hearing described how their careers were upended and how their individual medical or religious concerns were ignored.
A Sports Reporter’s Career Reset
One of the witnesses the Republican majority called to testify was Allison Williams, a sports reporter who had worked for ESPN for a decade until the sports broadcaster required her to either take the vaccine or lose her job.
In 2021, when ESPN began rolling out its vaccine mandate, Ms. Williams and her husband had been working with a fertility specialist in the hopes of having a second child. During what was an already stressful and emotional period, Ms. Williams testified that she shared concerns with her doctor about the vaccine and that her doctor had initially offered to support her in requesting a medical exemption. As the vaccine mandate went on and her doctor’s office began receiving more medical exemption requests, Ms. Williams testified that they reversed course and deferred their decision-making to the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which supported vaccination.
“Despite my doctor’s acknowledgment that this medical intervention was unnecessary for me as an individual patient, a blanket approach was taken for all patients disregarding our individual needs and risks,” Ms. Williams testified.
After her medical exemption request fell through, she sought a religious accommodation with ESPN, but the company’s human resource officials grew skeptical of her reasoning and instead gave her one week to either take the shot or be separated from the company. She ultimately accepted the separation.
Her departure from ESPN quickly caught public attention.
“Just like that, newly pregnant, I was stripped of my job, my health insurance and having my personal and medical decisions the topic of national news,” she told lawmakers on Thursday.
Ms. Williams has since found employment with Fox Sports, but she said her departure from ESPN brought on a period of uncertainty and career anxiety.
“It’s been very trying emotionally. Being a reporter for over a decade, that’s a large part of my identity. It wasn’t just my profession, it was my passion,” she told NTD News after the hearing. “I absolutely loved my job. I loved working for ESPN. The people there were fabulous. I was thankful for all the coaches and the relationships I had. So I had to spend a lot of time kind of reimagining what my life was like without a job that I had worked very hard to obtain, in a profession that I genuinely loved, in a very competitive business”
There were financial costs as well, and the media attention from her decision could have dissuaded future employers.
“A lot of money that was taken away from me and from my family and a lot of decisions that had to be made. Because of that, I lost my health insurance,” she said. “I was painted in a specific way across many platforms for my decision, assumptions made about political beliefs and different ideologies.”
Ms. Williams joined a lawsuit against ESPN in January, alleging the network had violated her rights under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which protects against religious-based discrimination.
Unvaccinated Troops Ousted Amid Recruiting Shortfall
Several vaccine mandates played out at the federal level, impacting government employees, including military service members.
Witness Danielle Runyan, senior counsel for religious liberty legal advocacy group First Liberty Institute spoke at length about the impacts of the vaccine mandate on service members, including troops being ordered out of the military while the services have struggled to recruit new people.
The First Liberty Institute challenged the military’s COVID-19 vaccine policy in court. The organization represented several service members, including highly trained pilots and U.S. Navy SEALs who sought exemptions from the vaccine mandate.
In her 321-page prepared remarks, Ms. Runyan included exhibits from the legal cases her organization brought. One of the documents was an appeal filed by the commander of the Naval Special Warfare Group 11 on behalf of a Special Warfare Combatant-Craft Crewman (SWCC), a member of a highly-trained and selective military unit. The special operations official specifically referenced concerns about the negative impacts of the vaccine policy on the ability to recruit and retain SEAL and SWCC servicemembers and said his unit anticipated gaining 10 personnel at the start of the 2022 fiscal year but instead saw a net loss of 28 personnel.
Lawmakers rescinded the militarywide COVID-19 vaccine mandate through a provision added to the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act. Still, concerns linger about how unvaccinated service members will be treated. Last year, Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro said allowing many service members to go unvaccinated will end up dividing the military into two categories: “Those that can’t deploy and those that can deploy.”
Ms. Runyan said Mr. Del Toro’s view is typical of military leaders, “despite lower-level commanders supporting subordinates who submitted [religious accommodation requests for the vaccine mandate] and determining that no compelling interest existed for requiring vaccination and denying [religious accommodation requests].”
Speaking with NTD News after the hearing, Ms. Runyan said unvaccinated troops could struggle to stay in the military because of career disruptions and bad performance reports they received for remaining unvaccinated.
“The harms are still ongoing, to say the least. The individuals who suffered these coercive and discriminatory practices, they are one to three years behind their peers,” she explained. “And frankly, they were just removed from their duties. So if you don’t have good performance reports, you’re very likely not going to promote, so potentially their careers could end in a few years.”
Ms. Runyan also warned that while the military’s COVID-19 vaccine has ended, “there’s nothing preventing” the military from pursuing similar vaccine policies in the future.
Private Business Versus Government Mandates
Rep. Rich McCormick (R-Ga.) offered a non-interventionist perspective on vaccine mandates. Dr. McCormick, a medical doctor who served in the U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps, said private businesses should be allowed to set their own vaccine requirements, though such requirements could be to their detriment.
“If you’re a private business, I don’t want the government to come and tell you whether you have to hire or fire anybody based on any status. That’s up to you as a business, you get to suffer those consequences,” he said.
Dr. McCormick said his hospital was among those that didn’t have a vaccine mandate and was able to hire nurses fired from other hospitals, amid a national shortage of nurses.
“We trusted if our nurses were around patients, 1000s of sick patients over the course of time that they had an immune system, they had those hard decisions to make,” he said. “And in fact, when other hospitals were firing theirs, we were like, ‘Come work for us.’ That’s good business, right? I let you decide with your feet where you’re gonna work, especially when there’s a severe nursing shortage.”
Dr. McCormick said when it comes to government-issued vaccine mandates, he believes there must be limits.
“I don’t want the government which is one of the biggest employers in the United States, deciding for people that they can’t make their own decisions,” he said.
