Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky rebuked the dean of the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing for not speaking out against the draconian coronavirus vaccine mandates that have contributed to a crippling nationwide nursing shortage.
Sarah Szanton, a registered nurse with a Ph.D. who’s a professor of “Health Equity and Social Justice” at the nursing school, testified Thursday during the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee’s hearing on “Examining Health Care Workforce Shortages.”
Paul, a physician, expressed frustration with the school’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
“Dr. Szanton, are you pro-choice in regards to patients making individualized medical choices?” he asked.
“Broadly, thank you, yes,” Szanton replied.
“Are you aware that your university doesn’t allow choice with regard to vaccination, that you require all of your students to have three vaccines in order to be students?” Paul asked.
“Yes,” she said.
He retorted: “So it’s sort of choice, but not so much when regarding vaccination.”
In Britain, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, they don’t have university mandates for the COVID-19 vaccine.
Then why do American universities, like Johns Hopkins, stick their heads in the sand and require three vaccines? pic.twitter.com/tQFcKQNowH
— Senator Rand Paul (@SenRandPaul) February 16, 2023
The three-term senator then pressed Szanton about the escalating instances of myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart that has occurred with alarming frequency among vaccinated young men.
“Are you aware of the increased risk of myocarditis with the COVID vaccine, particularly with successive COVID vaccinations in males between the ages of 16 and 24?” Paul asked.
Szanton refused to answer and replied, “I’m prepared to talk about the nursing crisis, and that we have vaccine requirements across the board for –“
Paul interjected by asking about her school’s ongoing vaccine mandate.
When Szanton said she does not set vaccine policy for Johns Hopkins, the senator chided her.
“Here’s the problem, if you exclude everybody from being a nurse who believes in basic immunology, you’re gonna include a lot of smart people — people who believe that you can get immunity from both vaccination as well as infection — and if you say, ‘Well, we’re just not gonna take the people who believe in that old-fashioned infection thing providing immunity, we’re only gonna take the people who do as they’re told,’” he said.
Paul grilled Szanton about the insanity of one-size-fits-all solutions, saying different patients require different treatments, especially those in different age groups.
“I mean, do you think individuals should be treated the same when they come to the emergency room?” he asked.
Should health care workers be required to have updated COVID vaccines?
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“You get an 18-year-old with chest pain and a 68-year-old obese diabetic with chest pain. You think they get treated the same in the emergency room? There are differences based on age.”
The senator continued: “We used to always make differences even on the flu vaccine. We advised it for people at risk. We’ve done this forever.”
Paul questioned the wisdom of disregarding those differences with the COVID vaccine mandates.
“We’re now doing it with an experimental vaccine,” he said.
I asked, “Can you tell me if anyone on the vaccine approval committees ever received money from the people who make vaccines?”
Fauci : “People who receive royalties are not required to divulge them.” pic.twitter.com/a0YIm2jfvZ
— Senator Rand Paul (@SenRandPaul) June 16, 2022
When Paul asked Szanton if she believes in natural immunity, she deflected.
The senator reacted with incredulous disbelief. “You’re a leader at Johns Hopkins and you could well have your opinion stated,” he said.
Paul pointed to the example of Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon and public policy researcher at Johns Hopkins who has repeatedly criticized the medical community’s refusal to champion natural immunity over vaccines in the fight against COVID-19.
“Dr. Marty Makary is there, and Dr. Marty Makary has been very active in this,” the senator said.
“He has looked at the incidence of myocarditis, and he says it’s 28 times more likely to get myocarditis from the vaccine than from COVID for a particular cohort of young men.”
Paul said as a dean at an institute of higher learning, Szanton has an obligation to examine and question the vaccine mandate amid disturbing reports of premature deaths in otherwise healthy young people.
The senator noted that many European universities do not have vaccine mandates, but Johns Hopkins continues to.
“In Britain, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, they don’t have university mandates on this,” he said. “Some countries don’t recommend it for children at all.
“There really is a debate and a discussion. You can have an opposite debate that if you believe in choice, when something has a debate and there’s arguments on both sides, you’d give people a choice.”
The physician noted that a large study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that unvaccinated individuals who had been infected with the coronavirus at some point were far less likely to be hospitalized than vaccinated people.
By now, the myth that the vaccine prevents viral transmission has been fully debunked, Paul said, so “when you mandate this, you can’t make any arguments about protecting other people, it’s only about you at this point.”
The senator underscored that he wasn’t saying people should not get vaccinated but that we should be allowed — and encouraged — to question the safety and efficacy of vaccine mandates, whether they’re ordered by the government or institutions.
“This isn’t an argument against vaccinations, it’s an argument for thinking and understanding that people of different ages could respond differently,” Paul said.
