By Ben Bartee, originally published via No College Mandates:
By cutting off their federal funding for non-compliance, Trump just effectively outlawed COVID-19 mandates at the remaining fifteen colleges and universities that still cling to the policy as a prerequisite for students and staff to participate in higher education.
Via The Hill (emphasis added):
“President Trump signed an executive order Friday to defund schools and other education agencies that require COVID-19 vaccines for students and staff.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the head of the Department of Education are directed to create a plan to end these mandates and end federal funding for entities that do not comply…
The order helps Trump fulfill his campaign to end the mandates many schools enacted after the COVID-19 vaccines were developed and as cases were ravaging the country under his first presidency.
“I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate,” he said on the campaign trail last year.”
No College Mandates co-founder Lucia Sinatra welcomed the news: “I think this is another perfect example of promises made, promises kept. It is long overdue because college students are still subject to these mandates as a condition of enrollment.”
Rather than washing our hands of the last four years and looking forward — as tempting as that may be — what further action we need is two-fold:
A full repeal of all vaccine requirements at all levels of education
Extreme and merciless legal consequences* (preferably criminal but at least civil) for the schools and universities and the individual administrative actors within them who mandated the COVID-19 shots, which never prevented transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and thus never had any true public health basis for being mandated
*The reason for prosecuting the actors, rather than merely exacting retribution, serves two purposes: a.) justice for the victims and b.) a deterrent for future administrators who might consider similar mandates in the future.
The executive order dovetails with RFK Jr.’s HHS takeover, which the corporate state media has been pearl-clutching about non-stop since he took the oath a few days ago.
Via HuffPost (emphasis added):
“Newly minted Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has expressed doubt about the efficacy of vaccinations and even helped spread false conspiracy theories that the jabs could cause harm.
Trump has given every indication that he is willing to capitulate to Kennedy’s theories.
On Thursday, the president signed an executive order titled “Establishing the President’s Make America Healthy Again Commission,” which outlined policy objectives and established Kennedy as head of the commission.
Language in the order hinted at conspiracy theories surrounding autism and even some long-prescribed psychiatric drugs; Kennedy’s commission is directed to assess the “prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, and weight-loss drugs.””
Presumably, RFK Jr. is now in control of all of HHS communications that the prior administration didn’t digitally burn on its way out.
Accordingly, in addition to going after the school administrators, we need to have RFK Jr. look into what actors within HHS may have leaned on public schools and universities — potentially using threats of funding revocations as sticks — to institute these pseudoscientific and draconian edicts. They await the swift provision of justice as well.
Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.
По материалам: http://www.planet-today.com/2025/02/via-executive-order-trump-cuts-funding.html