Ashish Jha says vaccine mandates "bred a lot of distrust and were harmful as well"

Yet, he is still not fully honest & the Biden administration suppressed criticism

Ashish Jha, White House COVID Czar appeared with Chris Cuomo and admitted that although he supported vaccine mandates, they did harm as well, and that the history of public health mandates is replete with errors. His new answer deserves partial credit, but, still contains gaslighting and revisionist history.

What Jha is still incorrect about is that, while he asserts mandates saved a lot of lives, that is entirely unclear. Vaccine mandates were deployed in the fall of 2021. Here is the US vaccination over time, can you see when the mandates happened? (note boosters not available till fall 2021— look at the red and blue curves.

There is at best a very tiny difference when vaccines were mandated— meaning most people got the vaccine pre-mandate or were probably going to get it anyway. Perhaps as little as 1-2% of US people got a dose of the vaccine due to the mandate. So the claim that mandates saved many lives is entirely uncertain. We don’t know how many got the vaccine due to mandate vs. would have gotten it without the mandate.

Also by the fall of 2021, it is not clear how much medical benefit a person got from getting the vaccine. People who already had covid probably got a 0.00000…% further reduction in death. Ergo, not a lot of lives saved. Young people forced to get the jab also made little difference. The mandates largely spared the elderly b/c you can’t take a way a job from a retired person. Mandates were poorly thought out by the Biden team.

Furthermore, vaccine mandates cost lives by pushing people out of the work force—a. socioeconomic death penalty. It also cost lives by breeding distrust. Jha is asserting, without good evidence, lives were saved to cover up for his blunder. He has no evidence to support his claim, and I think it is false.

Second, many of us were saying at the time mandates were an error. I wrote repeatedly that backlash would occur. Furthermore mandates were deployed AFTER the administration KNEW that vaccines don’t halt transmission— as such, with enough time, all people get COVID anyway, and mandates don’t benefit 3rd parties. They were always unethical.

Ashish Jha is right to now admit that mandates did harm, but he still thinks they made sense or were justified and that is incorrect. He is covering up for his own errors in judgement. Those errors were made likely because he was auditioning for the administration and praising their idiotic policy like a devoted lap dog.

But here is the worst part. The Biden administration— Murthy, Jha, Walensky— and the NIH folks— Fauci, Collins— and the FDA folks— Marks— repeatedly refused to engage with academics who disagreed with their policies. They weaponized the term “the science” to discredit opponents as they pushed for prolonged school closures, masking toddlers, and boosting adolescent men. Despite being begged to reconsider boosting young men due to risks of myocarditis, and revisit dosing, they pushed it relentlessly.

What is the lesson? The pandemic policy was mostly in error. Lockdowns, school closure, masking kids, mask mandates, vaccine mandates— these were irrational, non-evidence based responses to fear. Those who made all the errors are winning lifetime achievement awards from the National Academies, but a true audit of their decision making has not yet happened. But the worst thing they did, was prevent a fair debate and dialog, and that is the greatest threat going forward.