WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – U.S. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) introduced legislation Tuesday to deny federal tax dollars to any medical institution found to have denied medical care to patients on the basis of their vaccination status, the latest in the lawmaker’s leading role against the extremes of COVID-19 policy.
“No American should be denied access to critical care based on a personal medical decision, yet tragically, many hospitals and other medical facilities continue to discriminate against those unvaccinated for COVID-19,” Paul told Fox News. “The COVID-19 Vaccination Non-Discrimination Act will protect the rights of vulnerable patients to make their own health care choices and ensure that federal taxpayer dollars do not support facilities that turn away patients based on their COVID-19 vaccination status.”
Paul’s office cited the case of Yulia Hicks, a 14-year-old whom Duke Children’s Hospital denied a kidney transplant because she was unvaccinated for COVID, despite having already recovered from – and gained natural immunity to – the virus. (A GiveSendGo page for Ulia was last updated December 21, saying her parents had “made progress towards identifying a hospital in Florida” willing to do the transplant).
“There’s no reason that medical facilities should deny care to people based on their COVID-19 vaccination status, and there’s certainly no reason for institutions that do so to receive any federal funding,” said Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC), the lead sponsor of the House version of the bill.
Other sponsors include Senators Ron Johnson (R-WI), Mike Lee (R-UT), Tom Cotton (R-AR), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), J.D. Vance (R-OH), Mike Braun (R-IN), and Kevin Cramer (R-ND).
Many Americans continue to harbor reservations about the COVID shots, which were developed and released in a fraction of the time vaccines usually take under former President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed initiative, for both moral and practical reasons.
According to a detailed overview by the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute, Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson all used aborted fetal cells during their vaccines’ testing phase; and Johnson & Johnson also used the cells during the design & development and production phases. Many Americans believe the use of abortion-derived cells crosses a grave moral line.
While some in the media have attempted to deny or downplay that point, the Washington Examiner’s Timothy Carney notes that the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s journal Science admits that cell lines from aborted babies were used in the shots’ development. The left-wing “fact-checking” outlet Snopes has also acknowledged as much.
Many Americans also persist in severe doubts about the shots’ effectiveness and safety, citing mounting evidence linking them to significant health problems.
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The U.S. federal government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports 34,270 deaths, 191,486 hospitalizations, 18,504 heart attacks, and 26,388 myocarditis and pericarditis cases as of February 3. An April 2022 study out of Israel indicates that COVID infection itself cannot fully account for such myocarditis cases, despite common insistence to the contrary. Jab defenders are quick to stress that reports submitted to VAERS are unconfirmed, as anyone can submit one, but U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) researchers have recognized a “high verification rate of reports of myocarditis to VAERS after mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccination,” leading to the conclusion that “under-reporting is more likely” than over-reporting.
Further, VAERS is not the only data source containing red flags. Data from the U.S. Pentagon’s Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) shows that 2021 saw drastic spikes in a variety of diagnoses for serious medical issues over the previous five-year average, including hypertension (2,181%), neurological disorders (1,048%), multiple sclerosis (680%), Guillain-Barre syndrome (551%), breast cancer, (487%), female infertility (472%), pulmonary embolism (468%), migraines (452%), ovarian dysfunction (437%), testicular cancer (369%), and tachycardia (302%).
Last September, the Japanese Society for Vaccinology published a peer-reviewed study conducted by researchers from Stanford, UCLA, and the University of Maryland, which found that the “Pfizer trial exhibited a 36% higher risk of serious adverse events in the vaccine group” while the “Moderna trial exhibited a 6% higher risk of serious adverse events in the vaccine group,” for a combined “16% higher risk of serious adverse events in mRNA vaccine recipients.”
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In December 2022, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) hosted a roundtable discussion during which civil rights attorney Aaron Siri detailed data from the CDC’s V-Safe reporting system revealing that 800,000 of the system’s 10 million participants, or approximately 7.7 percent, reported needing medical care after COVID injection. “25 percent of those people needed emergency care or were hospitalized, and another 48 percent sought urgent care,” Siri added. “Also, another 25 percent on top of the 7.7 percent reported being unable to work or go to school.”
Another study by a team of American, British, and Canadian researchers, published December 5 in the Journal of Medical Ethics, found that COVID booster mandates for university students – a relatively healthy group at relatively low risk from the virus – do far more harm than good: “per COVID-19 hospitalisation prevented, we anticipate at least 18.5 serious adverse events from mRNA vaccines, including 1.5–4.6 booster-associated myopericarditis cases in males (typically requiring hospitalisation).”
Paul’s bill is unlikely to become law under President Joe Biden, who favors COVID vaccine mandates, but highlights one of the sharpest divides between their respective parties going into the 2024 elections.