Nineteen months into the global pandemic, the U.S. is again facing challenges in "building back better," as President Joe Biden once promised during his campaign trail.
Now that he's leading the White House, Biden has ordered a COVID vaccine mandate that, as well-intentioned as they may try to make it seem, also negatively affects millions of Americans across the country today. In September, the Democratic leader released a slew of orders to have federal employees and contractors, as well as private businesses with at least a hundred employees to require the vaccine on its workers, a rule that appeared to be very communist to some critics.
"This is exactly what the communists did in the old olden days. That is how they rolled," Dr. Jaroslav Flidr, a physicist and cyber security expert who was let go by George Washington University for refusing the COVID vaccine, told CBN News. Flidr is no stranger to communism, having grown up in Czechoslovakia and having been a student leader during Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution.
"So, when I saw (George Washington University COVID vaccine mandate), I was quite surprised, and I thought, 'No way, absolutely no way I would actually comply with this," Flidr said. "They couldn't force me to take an aspirin pill doing it this way. You want the (sic) fire me, fire me."
And so he was fired. Flidr recalled how based on experience, when citizens comply with government mandates such as the vaccine order, it only encourages the government to do it again. He explained how he appeared to receive a message saying that the government "owns" the people and "make [them] do whatever [it wants]." The physicist refused and declared that he did not "care what the cost is."
Conservative organizations are also standing up against President Biden's vaccine mandate, as Family Research Council president Tony Perkins condemned the rules as "a massive overreach by the federal government." Clarifying that he was not against the COVID vaccine and that he had in fact encouraged others to get the jab, Perkins said that he was "anti-government mandate."
The 1989-founded Liberty Counsel through its founder Mat Staver also decried President Biden's vaccine mandate, calling it "reprehensible," "un-American," and "unconstitutional." He said it was "despicable" to force healthcare workers all over the country to get the COVID vaccine just to keep their jobs.
Already, there have been major clashes between states and the people affected by President Biden's vaccine mandate. Police departments in various cities have forced their officers to get the jab, with some facing termination over it. In Maine, healthcare workers were defeated by a decision handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court when it refused to protect opponents of vaccine mandates from losing their jobs, the Associated Press reported.
The report said that it was the first time the U.S. Supreme Court decided on a statewide vaccine mandate, as it previously rejected vaccine mandate challenges in New York and Indiana. While Justice Stephen Breyer rejected the emergency appeal, he did however allow for retry as the deadline to get vaccinated, which is on October 29, is fast approaching. The judge decided in the case that regular COVID testing was not enough to ensure that the coronavirus' delta variant would not spread.
Dozens of healthcare workers at Central Maine Medical Lewiston, like many other hospitals that have mandated COVID vaccines in the U.S., have opted to quit, causing a shortage in staff in already overwhelmed medical facilities.
