[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 25 (Tuesday, February 7, 2023)]
[Senate]
[Pages S247-S249]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                                 COVID

  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

[[Page S248]]

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

[[Page S249]]

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.
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so 
ordered.