Thirty minutes was all that former President Joe Biden’s top health officials had allotted to discuss a policy that would shape the professional futures of millions of federal employees, firefighters, teachers and nurses.
In a brief Oct. 12, 2021, Zoom call, the Biden administration sought the counsel of four experts on their policy of mandating COVID-19 vaccines for a swath of workplaces together employing 100 million people.
Three of four medical experts favored a prior infection with COVID-19 contributing to vaccine mandates, the Daily Caller News Foundation has learned. Two of these experts said a prior infection should count as one dose of the two dose mRNA vaccines.
Despite repeatedly telling the public to trust the science, the Biden administration ignored its handpicked experts. The administration determined that a prior infection with COVID-19 would not count toward vaccine mandates because of the bureaucratic hurdles that policy would pose, one of the outside experts has said.
But that’s not what Biden’s top health officials communicated to the public.
When pressed on the policy by Congress, administration officials like National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky did not mention logistical challenges, instead arguing for the importance of hybrid immunity while sidestepping the question of whether prior infection alone might be sufficient for some Americans.
Their decision had wide-reaching ramifications. Though mired in legal challenges, the mandates compelled thousands of Americans to leave their jobs. Hundreds of health care workers resigned, were terminated, or placed on administrative leave and 8,000 members of the military were discharged for not receiving the vaccine. Several municipal and county governments — including New York City and Los Angeles — followed suit.
The new details land amid a national debate about the scope of the executive branch’s power to fire federal employees and contractors via the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
The fifth anniversary of the COVID-19 stay-at-home orders has also prompted a fresh look at some of the pandemic’s public health messaging. Even some experts at bitter loggerheads with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy over his vaccine statements agree that some opaque decision-making during the pandemic has created a lasting problem with public trust.
The 2021 meeting included Fauci, Walensky, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins. They sought input from four scientists: Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and University of Pennsylvania vaccinologist Paul Offit, Yale University School of Medicine immunobiologist Akiko Iwasaki, University of Minnesota epidemiologist Michael Osterholm and Baylor College of Medicine vaccinologist Peter Hotez.
Offit first revealed the meeting about vaccine mandates in a January 2022 YouTube interview. The Epoch Times reported more details in February 2023 through documents the outlet obtained in a Freedom of Information Act request. Offit has previously described the experts as split 2-2, but clarification from all of the participants by DCNF revealed a split closer to 3-1.
Three of the four scientists – Offit, Iwasaki and Osterholm – informed DCNF that they recalled leaning toward the position that a prior infection should count towards vaccine mandates, though they also emphasized the boost in immunity conferred by vaccines.
“People were angry that they were mandated to take a vaccine despite having been naturally infected. They were saying ‘I’m protected, why am I being forced to get this to go out in public?’ And that was true, frankly, you were protected against severe disease,” Offit said in an interview with the DCNF.
Iwasaki said in an email to the DCNF that, while she argued for the benefit of vaccinating post-infection, she favored equating a prior infection to a single dose of vaccine.
“We all thought that regardless of infection history, the vaccine would boost antibody levels and would be beneficial,” Iwasaki said. “However, I do not recall saying that prior infection should not count towards vaccine requirements. I was leaning towards prior infection counting as a vaccine dose.”
Osterholm also favored an infection being considered equivalent to one shot of the two-shot mRNA regimen, his aide confirmed to DCNF.
Hotez said in an email to DCNF that his position remained that vaccination is necessary to help prevent repeated infections, though he said that he could not recall the specifics of the meeting and downplayed his influence on the Biden administration’s decision as a non-governmental scientist.
“I don’t recall that particular meeting, a long time back. And my views, to my knowledge, don’t influence government policy. I don’t have any position with the government. But I think my views haven’t changed that much,” Hotez said. “If you were unlucky enough to be infected with one of the original lineage viruses, including alpha and delta, it should give you significant protective immunity. But if natural infection occurs and you are not vaccinated it comes at a heavy price in terms of hospitalizations, heart attacks (SARS-2 is a thromboembolic virus), strokes, death, and long Covid.”
Offit said that the majority of experts were overruled by the Biden administration because of the logistical hurdles involved with proving prior immunity.
“The question was, bureaucratically, would it work if people can go on the Internet and just say ‘look I’ve been naturally infected’ and get out of it? It became more of a bureaucratic issue,” Offit said in a podcast interview.
Administration officials did not cite bureaucratic hurdles as driving their decision in the fall of 2021. They argued vaccination was important even in those with a prior infection for long-term immune cells — a contrast to what Offit was advising privately.
“Mandates work,” Fauci said in a November 2021 interview. “It isn’t because we want to take away people’s individual rights.”
The government’s “responsibility to society is the reason to do mandates,” he said.
In an interview with congressional investigators in January 2024, Fauci acknowledged that it should be studied whether the mandates may have driven vaccine hesitancy.
“We really need to take a look at the psyche of the country, have maybe some social-type studies to figure out, does the mandating of vaccines, in the way the country’s mental framework is right now, does that actually cause more people to not want to get vaccinated?” Fauci said.
Divergent Diagnoses
Offit and Kennedy, longtime rivals, have vastly divergent diagnoses of the problems at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
“We’re going to work together to launch a new era of radical transparency,” Kennedy said in a February address to HHS staff.
Last week, HHS released a new tool allowing users to readily search for the apparent conflicts of interest of members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).
In addition, NIH Acting Director Matthew Memoli canceled grants studying how to increase vaccine uptake earlier this month. Grants studying mRNA technology are receiving extra scrutiny, according to a recent KFF Health News report. Memoli himself had opposed the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates.
Offit acknowledged in an interview with DCNF that opaque decisions the Biden administration made on COVID-19 “feed into public distrust.”
The month before the meeting on vaccine mandates, in September 2021, Offit was among the members of the Food and Drug Administration’s outside advisory panel, the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory (VRBPAC), who opposed recommending boosters to people without a high risk for severe disease.
Offit said certain statements by Fauci, Walensky and former White House COVID-19 Advisor Ashish Jha on booster shots “lacked a certain humility that would have helped.”
But Offit strongly rejects Kennedy’s view that the pharmaceutical industry’s influence in the government allows for dangerous vaccines to gain approval. He argued the poor decisions on COVID-19 can’t be tied to lobbying or personal profiteering, instead faulting the Biden administration for missteps in pursuit of an overly simple public health message.
“I hate that term ‘radical transparency.’ It feeds into this general feeling that there are conspiracies going on,” Offit said.
Featured Image Credit: Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America
