Covid
Floor Speech
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Mr. CRUZ. Mr. President, when the COVID pandemic hit, small businesses were shut down; millions of Americans lost their jobs; schools were shut down; flights were canceled; and traveling ground to a halt. The sick and the elderly were forced to die in hospitals and nursing homes, tragically alone, without the comforting embrace of loved ones.
The corporate media told us there was no way that this virus could have escaped from a Chinese Government lab, and Big Tech companies banned and censored posts laying out the evidence that it had escaped from a Chinese lab, labeling that evidence a ``conspiracy theory.'' Masks were mandated everywhere.
And when the COVID vaccines came out, those were mandated too. Doctors, nurses, and our brave service men and women who chose not to get the vaccine were fired, discharged, sent home.
The corrupt corporate media's reaction to COVID devastated our economy and led directly to massive inflation, to weakening and even destroying faith in public health institutions, and resulted in learning loss that millions of American children may never recover from.
The pandemic is over. President Biden has even admitted that. The vast majority of America has moved on with their lives. But, sadly, the Biden White House and too many Senate Democrats want to cling to power. During the pandemic, we saw abuses of power at every level of government but especially the Federal Government. Over the past 2 years, I have been proud to lead the fight in the Senate to stop these abuses by introducing targeted pieces of legislation that I have reintroduced in this new Congress.
Five of these bills would get rid of mandates. If passed into law, they would mean no more mask mandates, no vaccine mandates, no vaccine passports, no vaccine mandates for minors, and no vaccine mandates for kids to go back to school in Washington, DC.
Two other bills concern vital healthcare. The GIVE LIFE Act, or Doss's bill, is named after a teenager in Texas who was denied a kidney transplant because he hadn't been vaccinated against COVID. No American should be denied a lifesaving medical treatment such as an organ transplant because of their COVID vaccine status. That is wrong.
Unfortunately, we have seen this kind of discrimination over and over again. We saw it happen to a teenager in Texas. It also happened to a 31-year-old man in Boston who was denied a heart transplant, to a 38- year-old veteran who had already had COVID twice who was denied a kidney transplant in North Carolina, and a man in South Carolina who was also denied a kidney transplant because he wasn't vaccinated against COVID. Just in December, yet another teenager was denied a kidney transplant, this time in North Carolina, because she wasn't vaccinated against COVID. The GIVE LIFE Act would stop the Federal Government from enabling this discrimination when it comes to organ donation.
Another bill, the Ending Discrimination in COVID-19 Treatments Act, would mandate the Department of Health and Human Services to require that providers not engage in discriminatory practices when treating COVID. I filed this bill in response to reports that States across the country have used race and ethnicity as a factor in determining whether someone is eligible to receive COVID treatments, particularly monoclonal antibodies when they were first introduced. This bill now applies to all COVID funding and treatments, not just monoclonal antibodies.
This kind of discrimination and treatment has happened in the past year. In January 2022, a man in New York who had both COVID and pneumonia was denied monoclonal antibodies. He told CBS News:
The doctor just shut me down and said this is the criteria: You're not of age, which is 65, and you're not a minority.
As part of its response, the New York Department of Health told CBS:
This guidance is based on CDC guidelines that show COVID mortality rates are higher among certain demographic groups, including senior citizens, immunocompromised individuals, and nonwhite/Hispanic communities.
So what New York said is they were following CDC guidelines in determining how this COVID treatment would be distributed. As New York, itself, admitted, the CDC guidelines are encouraging racial discrimination in the distribution of healthcare, and that is immoral and wrong. My bill would stop this discrimination. Let's be very clear here. Race, religion, ethnicity should not be a factor--zero--in determining anyone's medical treatment. Doing so is unconstitutional; it is wrong; and it is abhorrent.
These are battles worth fighting.
For those of us who have been standing up against these abusive mandates, we recently won a big victory in December of last year on COVID vaccines in the military. I have fought hard to end President Biden's military vaccine mandate and last month, December, we succeeded. We passed into law a provision to end the mandate, finally, but, sadly, that provision was prospective. The Democrats in Congress would only agree to it going forward if it applied in the future, but provided zero relief to the thousands or even tens of thousands of service men and women who were terminated because they declined to get the vaccine.
To fix this, I have introduced legislation called the AMERICANS Act, which would allow those service men and women who were terminated to be reinstated if they want to go back into the military. And if they do, they could go back to their original rank and receive the benefits to which they were entitled and which they have earned.
If those servicemembers choose not to go back in the military, my bill would ensure that they receive an honorable discharge--not merely a general discharge, as too many of them have received--which will ensure that they can receive the benefits they earned by fighting to defend this country.
I am committed to fighting for every soldier, every sailor, every airman, every marine, every coastguardsman who was wrongfully terminated or wrongfully demoted because of the COVID vaccine mandate. And I give my word: I am going to keep fighting for them until they see justice.
That is why tonight, we are going to be at the State of the Union Address on the other side of the Capitol, and my guest tonight for the State of the Union is LT Levi Beaird, a naval surface warfare officer. Lieutenant Beaird is a Texas resident and a top-rated officer. In March of 2022, he faced a separation board because he made the personal decision to decline to get the COVID vaccine. But before the Biden administration could kick him out, a Federal judge entered an injunction preventing the Navy from terminating Lieutenant Beaird. However, the Navy is, right now, trying to recoup from him $75,000 that they already paid him in anticipation of Lieutenant Beaird's becoming a department head because he wasn't named a department head. Well, the reason he wasn't named a department head is because he made the personal decision not to get the COVID vaccine due to his own sincere religious objection.
I am proud to be welcoming Lieutenant Beaird to the State of the Union tonight. I hope that his being there will cause those in the media to tell his story because it really underscores how grotesquely unfair the Biden administration's policies have been and how they punish those American heroes. So Lieutenant Beaird will be in the audience tonight as Joe Biden, no doubt, will congratulate himself and try to avoid accountability for the problems his administration has caused.
When it comes to COVID, the pandemic we endured as a nation was an enormous challenge. The policies that were put in place across this country in response to the pandemic, many of them have caused enormous damage. I believe, as a nation, we will look back on these policies, in the years and decades to come, and wonder what collective insanity came over this country; what insanity led to the judgment that it is a good idea to shut down schools for tens of millions of children across this country for more than a year; that it is a good idea for young children, elementary school children, not to learn reading and writing and math. That policy has resulted in massive learning loss, and that learning loss has been all the greater among the economically disadvantaged, among Hispanic and African-American kids.
The result of these shutdowns is a generation of kids who have been harmed, perhaps, irreparably.
In our military, the results of firing thousands upon thousands of service men and women--and we don't know how many. I would note, I asked the Biden administration over and over again: How many of our heroes have you fired? The administration refuses to answer. It is, in the minimum, thousands; it may be in the tens of thousands. But I can tell you, I have spoken with Navy SEALS, heroes who spent their lives training and defending this Nation, and they are being fired--some of the youngest, healthiest people we have in our country are being fired because they didn't comply with an arbitrary decree.
And now, the President and the administration have admitted that decree should no longer be enforced, but the Navy Seals they fired last year or the year before are still out of the military. All the while, we have massive recruiting shortfalls, and America is in greater jeopardy.
Mr. President, you are new on this side of the aisle but not new to Congress. There was a time in this body when Republicans and Democrats could come together and reason together, where not everything we did was a shirts-and-skins partisan battle: Good morning. No, it is not.
In less vituperative times, these shouldn't be difficult questions. When I forced a vote on the Senate floor that the DC Public Schools should not throw out of school every student who hasn't received the COVID vaccine--and, mind you, that is 20 percent of the students in DC Public Schools, and, in the African-American community, it is 40 percent of the African-American students in the DC Public Schools. I am sorry to say, but when we voted on that on the Senate floor, every single Democrat--all of them--voted to throw out of public schools 40 percent of the Black kids in DC. You are talking about a 13-, 14-, 15-year-old kid who Senate Democrats were willing to make a high-school dropout involuntarily because that child or that child's parents made the decision not to receive the vaccine.
In ordinary sane times, that should be a 100-to-nothing vote. You would think it was almost satirical that someone would stand up and say: We are debating whether or not to throw out of DC Public Schools 40 percent of the African-American children.
If you and I go home and talk to our citizens at home, to a person, they would think that was nuts, unless they happened to work in this building.
On the question of service men and women, we saw, in the preceding year, that President Biden called to congratulate a coastguardsman who showed incredible heroism rescuing people at a time of natural disaster. That coastguardsman, within the week, was notified that he was being terminated because he hadn't gotten the COVID vaccine. This shouldn't be divisive.
We want our soldiers and sailors and airmen and marines and coastguardsmen to be ready, to be trained, to be serving, and, if the administration agrees the mandate makes no sense today, why would we sit by and let thousands upon thousands of them remain fired, terminated, and denied the benefits they have earned?
So I call upon this body: Let's have a return to sanity. Let's fight for the men and women we are elected to represent. And I give you my word that I am going to continue to fight against these mandates that are wrong, that are unjust, that are harmful, and I hope and pray this body can come together and embrace sanity once again.
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