[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 144 (Thursday, September 7, 2023)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4248-S4252]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                 Unanimous Consent Request--S. Res. 332

  Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, the Flat Earth Society is champing at the 
bit to bring back masks even though the Cochrane analysis has looked at 
78 randomized controlled studies and shown that masks didn't stop 
transmission, didn't stop hospitalization, and didn't lessen deaths. In 
other words, the masks on a population level had no influence over the 
spread of COVID. Again, the Flat Earth Society cannot listen and absorb 
these facts. They want the masks to come back.
  In addition, the Flat Earth Society also wants to mandate three COVID 
vaccines for kids despite no evidence that COVID vaccines reduce 
transmission, hospitalization, or death for adolescents. Yet, to this 
very day, Senate pages are required to get three vaccines in order to 
participate in the program.

  I rise today out of a desire to protect the health of the young men 
and women who serve as Senate pages. I think we can all agree that the 
Senate wouldn't function very well without the pages.
  The very first page was a 9-year-old boy named Grafton Hanson. He was 
appointed by   Daniel Webster back in 1829. In those days, the pages 
had to refill the inkwells and clean out the spittoons. Things have 
changed a little bit around here since then. The work isn't quite as 
messy anymore, but it is still a high-pressure job for a high school 
student.
  From day one, our country's response to the pandemic made the 
comfortable more comfortable while the working class had to keep on 
working. And now, in the Halls of Congress, a privileged class can 
choose whether to get vaccinated while an underclass must abide by 
COVID dictates. Think about it. The antiquarians of the Senate are not 
required to be vaccinated, but the young, healthy people--at zero risk 
for death from COVID--are being forced to be vaccinated three times.
  To become a Senate page, you must get a COVID-19 booster shot, but 
study after study demonstrates that for young and healthy people, the 
risks posed by the vaccine are greater than the risk from COVID. Let me 
be clear about that. This is for young, healthy adolescents; the facts 
are different.
  If you are elderly or infirm or have other risk factors, the risks of 
the disease outweigh the risks of the vaccine, but for young, healthy 
people, none of them will die from COVID. Almost all of them have 
either had a vaccine or had the disease or both, but we are mandating 
that they have three vaccines.
  Study after study shows that it makes no sense to mandate COVID 
vaccinations for teenagers who are healthy and that such a mandate 
actually may be dangerous to adolescents. A study published last year 
in the Journal of the American Medical Association Cardiology examined 
23 million people ages 12 and up across Denmark, Finland, Norway, and 
Sweden. It found that after two doses of mRNA vaccine, ``the risk of 
myocarditis was higher within 28 days of vaccination.'' So they had a 
risk of developing a heart inflammation within 28 days of the 
vaccination compared with the group who was unvaccinated and that the 
risk increased with each successive dose.
  So there is a risk, particularly for the ages between 16 and 24, of 
an inflammation of the heart, and it increases with each successive 
dose. So if you are going to mandate three vaccines on a group of kids 
who have zero risk of dying and the vaccine doesn't prevent 
transmission, protects no one, all you are doing is adding a risk to 
their health. And for goodness' sake, in a free country, couldn't we 
let them make their own medical decisions?
  This is exactly why European countries, including Germany, France, 
Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, restrict the use of mRNA vaccines 
for COVID. There are rules for young people. Yet the policy for the 
Senate pages blindly commands three vaccines for young, healthy people.
  A study published in December in the Journal of Medical Ethics found 
that per million third doses, booster doses, of COVID vaccine, up to 
147 cases of myocarditis may be caused in males ages 18 to 29; up to 80 
percent of those diagnosed with vaccine-induced myocarditis or 
pericarditis continue to struggle with cardiac inflammation more than 3 
months after receiving a second dose.
  Yet, remember, this is a group of people who have zero deaths--zero 
deaths. There are no deaths of young, healthy people from COVID, and we 
are mandating that they take three vaccines. We are supposed to be the 
leaders in this country. What science are we looking at? What science 
are we obeying? We are reacting in an emotional way. We are promoting 
hysteria and leading with the wrong example.
  Recently, Dr. Vinay Prasad and Dr. Benjamin Knudsen published a 
review in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation that examined 
29 studies across three continents. Six of the 29 studies showed that 
after two doses of mRNA vaccine, more than 1 in 10,000 males between 
the ages of 12 and 24 would experience myocarditis.
  Think about it. To be a page up here, you send a perfectly healthy 
young man or woman up here, and then you give them the risk of a 
serious heart inflammation over a disease that is evolving every 3 or 4 
months--such that the vaccine is good for about 3 or 4 months, until it 
is no longer good--for a disease that was never deadly for children.
  Initially, the argument was: Oh, we have to stop the children from 
transmitting it to the old people. It doesn't

[[Page S4249]]

work that way. The only thing even the proponents of the vaccine argue 
is that the individual vaccinated may have a reduction of 
hospitalization and death, but those statistics only hold for at-risk 
populations: the elderly, the immunocompromised, the ill. For young, 
healthy people, there is no health advantage to being vaccinated, and 
there is actually a health disadvantage the more vaccines you give 
them.
  It is actually medical malpractice to continue to mandate three 
vaccines, whether it is in the Senate or in a university, and 
unfortunately, the example that is being set here in the Senate is 
being followed in other universities around the country of mandating 
three vaccines.
  A study published recently in the Annals of Internal Medicine found 
that regardless of sex, among those ages 5 to 39, myocarditis or 
pericarditis occurred in 1 in every 50,000 after a first booster. With 
statistics like that, why would we think it is a good idea to insist on 
boosters for our young, healthy pages who are in their early teenage 
years?
  We are taking the rights of the individual, their parents, and their 
physicians to make a decision based on their risk factors and their 
individual parameters, and we are making a blanket rule that says they 
need to get vaccinated. Yet study after study is showing that the risks 
of the vaccine exceed the risks of the disease for this particular age 
group. It is the height of malpractice to subject young people to the 
greater risk of vaccination simply to satisfy mandates designed to 
protect bureaucrats from accountability.
  Now, I am told that the Democrats will object to this today. The 
Democrats will stand up and say they know better than your parents. The 
Democrats will stand up and say they know better than these kids' 
doctors and that, by golly, if you want to be on the Senate floor, you 
have to have three vaccines.
  Well, guess what. I have got zero. I am standing right here. I have 
got zero vaccines. I had COVID in the first month of the disease. And, 
actually, I would have gotten vaccinated, but I got the disease early 
on, and then all the evidence pointed toward immunity being gained from 
having the disease. So I didn't bother getting the vaccine. Members of 
my family got the vaccine. We recommended that my elderly in-laws get 
the vaccine. But the thing is, we made that choice.
  And so here I sit without a vaccine, and I won't wear a mask because 
they don't work either. Yet then we are telling them. In a month, are 
we going to be putting them back in masks? The Democrats want everybody 
in masks. They want the hysteria to return. Why? Because they don't 
think any of us are smart enough to make our own decisions. They want 
to make the decision for us. The common man be damned. The working 
class be damned. Americans be damned. The Democrats are going to tell 
you to wear a mask, and the Democrats are going to tell you how many 
vaccines to get.
  Well, the vaccine goes out of style. The virus evolves away from the 
vaccine within a couple of months. How many mandates are there going to 
be? Why not six mandates? Why not 12? Why not mandate the newest 
booster that may be more effective than the last booster? Which one are 
we mandating? They just have to get three vaccines. But it goes against 
the science.
  Let's say you even grant the Democrats that there might be some 
science on the other side of it. Good. Let the individual make the 
decision. Whatever happened to the idea of individual choice? Whatever 
happened to the idea of choice with regard to your body and your 
medical decisions? The hypocrisy is astounding.
  Recently, Drs. Vinay Prasad, Tracy Beth Hoeg, and Ram Duriseti shed 
light on some of the science surrounding this, on some of the efforts 
to manufacture studies that artificially bolster the case for mandates. 
In a letter published this July in the New England Journal of Medicine, 
Dr. Prasad and his team question an Israeli study that the FDA and our 
government--Democrats--are trying to use to justify forcing people to 
take boosters.
  This study, they said, shows a 90-percent reduction in death if you 
take the COVID booster vaccine. And they kind of scratched their heads, 
and they said: Well, almost nobody is dying anymore because the virus 
has become less dangerous as it has evolved. More people have immunity, 
either natural or vaccine immunity. To have a 90-percent reduction in a 
death rate that is already very tiny just seems a little bit 
unbelievable.
  So they looked at the data from the study, and what they found was 
that, actually, there was a 90-percent reduction in the booster 
category for all diseases: cancer, a variety of--diabetic, heart 
attacks, you name it; people died 90 percent less of the time if you 
were boosted. It is like: Wow. A booster cures heart disease; it cures 
diabetes; it cures cancer. No. It turned out the study was flawed and 
that the group that had been boosted died 90 percent less of the time 
just because you have got to select it out for a group that was very 
healthy versus a group that was less healthy.
  The study was flawed, and it took scientists with the courage to 
stand up to the New England Journal and say: Look at the data.
  The original authors of the data finally released and said: Whoops. 
We made a big mistake here. Our study doesn't really prove what we said 
it proved.
  When the FDA approved boosters for kids, did they show that it 
reduced transmission? No. When they approved vaccines for adolescents, 
did they show that it reduced hospitalization? No. Did they show that 
it reduced deaths? No, because no kids are dying from COVID. You can't 
be less than zero deaths.
  How did they approve the vaccine at all for adolescents? How did they 
approve the booster? They said: If we give them a booster, they make 
antibodies.
  I confronted Anthony Fauci on this, and I said: Well, I can give you 
a hundred vaccines. Every individual I give it to will make antibodies. 
That doesn't prove you need it. You need to prove that it does 
something.
  If you give them three vaccines, will they transmit the disease less? 
No evidence of it. Will they be hospitalized less? No evidence of it. 
Will they die less often? No evidence. There is no evidence other than 
the laboratory tests saying they make antibodies but no evidence that 
they need to make more antibodies.
  But one thing we know: If you are a young person who has had COVID 
recently--even the CDC admits this: If you have had COVID within 3 
months and you take a vaccine, you have a profound risk of getting an 
overly exuberant immune response and having the myocarditis because you 
have had the vaccine in the middle of an immune response that you are 
making against the disease.
  Yet do you recall anyone at one of these pharmacies that are all 
handing out the vaccine and pushing it--have you had any example of 
them saying: Well, have you had COVID recently? Maybe you should wait 3 
months. No. Nobody is paying any attention to natural immunity. Nobody 
is paying any attention to the natural course of the disease. And 
nobody is really paying any attention to the danger the vaccine 
presents to young people.
  This is not a benign situation. This is a situation where the 
Democrats are in favor of mandating a vaccine that puts their health at 
risk. We are telling kids all across America: You cannot come up here 
unless you get what the Democrats tell you is the best thing for your 
health. And even though there are some scientists who say that it may 
actually imperil your health, you don't get a choice; and you can't be 
part of the nationwide Senate program, you can't be part of this elite 
group, unless you submit, unless you bend the knee to the Democrats, 
unless you say: My body belongs to the Democratic Party; my body will 
be injected with whatever the Democrats tell me I need to do because I 
don't have control over my medical decisions; the Democratic Party 
does.
  This is obscene, and the Democratic majority should be embarrassed 
that they are here today telling us that American parents and American 
families are not smart enough to make their own decisions.
  In the letter, Dr. Prasad and his colleagues wrote that the 
``[u]nderlying health plays a substantial role in COVID-19-related 
mortality'' and ``[i]nclusion of mortality not related to COVID-19 in 
all observational . . .

[[Page S4250]]

studies would provide important context.''
  So, in other words, it looks like the studies that may have shown any 
indication that boosters might help were incorrectly performed, but the 
vast majority of the studies have shown no effect on transmission, 
hospitalization, or death. They do not exist.
  I would love for the Democrats, when they stand up and talk about 
forcing kids to do this, if they would present the studies for us that 
show why or show that the booster vaccine actually aids in reduction of 
transmission, hospitalization, or death of adolescents.
  Even from within the government, though, some have resisted the ever-
expanding booster mandates. In 2021, the Director and Deputy Director 
of the FDA's Office of Vaccine Research and Review--not someone who is 
opposed to vaccines, someone who has been involved with the development 
and promotion of vaccinations his entire career--resigned, two of these 
guys resigned, citing White House pressure to approve third doses for 
all adults, writing damning op-eds critical of the FDA's subsequent 
decision to do so.
  One of these op-eds ran in the Washington Post and was coauthored by 
Dr. Paul Offit--once again, not an opponent of vaccines, not an 
opponent of the COVID vaccine, a professor of pediatrics and director 
of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, 
a longtime advocate of vaccines who has been involved in the mainstream 
pro-vaccine community--objected.
  As a member of the FDA's Vaccine Advisory Committee, Dr. Offit did 
not support widespread boosting. He and two former FDA officials wrote 
that ``healthy young person[s] with two mRNA vaccine doses is extremely 
unlikely to be hospitalized with COVID, so the case for risking any 
side effects--such as myocarditis--diminishes substantially.'' Dr. 
Offit even advised his own son not to get a booster because he was 
already well protected against severe disease.
  So here we have advocates of the vaccine, mainstream scientists who 
work in the vaccine community, who have been promoting vaccines for the 
health of the community. These are not people opposed to vaccines, 
saying they would not give a booster to their child; they would not 
give a third COVID vaccine because the risks of the vaccine outweigh 
the risks of the disease.
  This really encapsulates the debate here. Your healthcare is about 
you. You are not a statistic. The Democrats somehow feel you are a cog 
in their wheel, and you are just supposed to do what everybody does and 
do as they say. But really, your healthcare decisions are based on your 
risks of getting COVID, your risk of dying, being hospitalized, or 
transmitting it. It is about you. That is why you make the decision. 
Instead, they want a blanket mandate. And by doing it to the pages here 
and forcing them to submit to this, what they are doing is setting a 
terrible example for the country.
  One editorial put it this way last year:

       If being ``boosted'' becomes a prerequisite for 
     participation in normal life, the vaccine's diminishing 
     efficacy means the booster campaign will never end.

  What does that mean? The virus is evolving. It is like the flu. It is 
changing every 3 or 4 months. The vaccine becomes outdated within 3 or 
4 months. So if you are at risk, by all means, keep getting the updated 
vaccine. We are not even mandating the updated vaccine; we are 
mandating a booster and often a booster that is a year or two old and 
has no effect at all on the vaccine, even for people who are 
susceptible to this. But we need to let the individual kids and their 
parents make this decision.
  Dr. Marty Makary is a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. 
He wrote in the Wall Street Journal that ``[t]he U.S. government is 
pushing COVID-19 vaccine boosters for 16- and 17-year-olds without 
supporting clinical data. A large Israeli population study, published 
in the New England Journal of Medicine . . . found that the risk of 
COVID death in people under 30 with two vaccine shots was zero.''
  So there is no science behind this. A large study of the entire 
country of Israel, which keeps great records on this, found that kids 
that had been vaccinated twice had zero deaths. Germany showed the same 
thing--not just a few, not a small number, zero deaths among kids aged 
5 to 17.
  There is no scientific rationale for mandating three COVID vaccines 
for healthy kids. Even the World Health Organization's chief scientist, 
Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, said last year that ``there's no evidence right 
now'' that suggests healthy children and adolescents need booster 
shots. Even the WHO--one of the most pro-vaccine mandate groups you can 
find in the world--has said they don't recommend booster shots.
  Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard Medical School says that mandating 
people who have already had COVID still get vaccinated ``makes zero 
sense''--zero sense--``from a scientific point of view, and it makes 
zero sense from a public health point of view.''
  A study in the Lancet supported this view, stating that ``[c]urrent 
evidence does not . . . appear to show a need for boosting in the 
general population, in which efficacy against severe disease remains 
high.''
  What does that mean? Why do they have efficacy? Why can they fight 
it? Because they are young and healthy, and the disease seems to have a 
predilection for the elderly. They are young and healthy, but they have 
already had COVID. They have immunity. And many of them have all been 
vaccinated. But we aren't demanding even just basic vaccination; we are 
demanding three vaccines. And what we know is that with each individual 
vaccine, the risk for heart inflammation goes up. It is less if they 
have one. It is less if they have two. It is even more, though, if you 
get to a third.
  When we consider the rules for the pages, we ought to ask: Will these 
policies be expected to continue indefinitely? COVID is with us 
forever. COVID is now the new flu. Fortunately, it has become less 
deadly over time. It was quite deadly in 2020, and each successive 
evolution of the virus has made it less deadly. The death rate is 
dramatically reduced.
  Even at its peak, the death rate was about .3 percent, about three 
times greater than the seasonal flu. It still meant a million Americans 
died either from COVID or with COVID, but it is now lessened in 
severity. Are they going to continue to tell us how to make our 
healthcare decisions forever? Are Democrats so insistent that they know 
better than everyone else that we will be beholden to bending the knee 
and asking their permission to live? Are we going to ask permission 
whether or not--they will come to us and say: To participate in life, 
you have to be vaccinated three times. There is no science to back this 
up.

  When it comes to vaccines, although they can benefit the vaccinated 
person if that person is in a risk category, in Denmark, vaccines were 
not shown to have any impact on household viral transmission or 
secondary attack rate.
  Even the proponents of the mandates will admit, if forced to admit, 
the vaccines don't stop transmission. The only thing they can hang 
their hat on is there is reduced hospitalization, but that only exists 
if you are in a category of increased risk.
  Over a certain age, over a certain weight, have some diseases, 
immunocompromised, there is some evidence of reduced hospitalization if 
you have immunity. But actually, it is less so with each subsequent one 
and really hasn't fully accounted for the natural immunity that people 
get from having the disease, which still needs to be studied.
  Multiple scientific studies have shown, though, that there is a 
heightened risk of myocarditis--heart inflation--for children and 
teenagers after taking mRNA COVID vaccine. That is why multiple 
countries began restricting it for certain age groups. Germany, France, 
Denmark, Finland, and Sweden all restricted Moderna's vaccine for young 
people. Norway, South America, and the UK all chose to recommend only 
one dose of Pfizer due to the risk of cardiovascular side effects for 
boostering kids.
  But what we are going to find out today is the Democratic Party 
doesn't care about the science, doesn't care about choice with regard 
to your medical decisions, can't even allow a debate whether you get 
one, two, or three vaccines, but it is going to insist that, to be part 
of the U.S. Capitol, the U.S. Senate Page Program, you must bend the 
knee to the Democratic Party and

[[Page S4251]]

do what they say about your vaccines or you can't be a participant.
  Why is the U.S. Senate choosing to ignore risks other countries 
acknowledge when mandating these vaccines for young people who are in 
peak physical condition?
  Public health measures should be backed up with proof that the 
benefits outweigh the burdens. There is no evidence of that when it 
comes to vaccination and booster mandates, especially for teenagers, 
who as a group are less vulnerable to this virus than any Senator.
  That is why I ask unanimous consent that the Senate pass my 
resolution to end all COVID-related mandates for pages who serve in 
this Chamber.
  Mr. President, as in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent 
that the Senate proceed to S. Res. 332, which is at the desk; further, 
that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the 
motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon table.


 =========================== NOTE =========================== 

  
  On page S4251, September 7, 2023, in the left column, the 
following appears: I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed 
to S. Res. 322
  
  The online Record has been corrected to read: I ask unanimous 
consent that the Senate proceed to S. Res. 332


 ========================= END NOTE ========================= 


  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  The Senator from Maryland.
  Mr. CARDIN. Mr. President, reserving the right to object.
  Mr. President, I have major concerns about this unanimous consent 
request. But let me start first with the process, whether we should be 
legislating a policy in regard to the health of our pages. Despite what 
the Senator from Kentucky has said, the policies concerning our pages' 
health is not set on a partisan basis; it is set based upon the 
recommendations of our health professionals. They are not politicians. 
They are not making partisan decisions. They are making their 
recommendations based upon what they believe is in the best interests 
of the health of the people who work in this institution, including our 
Senate pages.
  So I am concerned about the unanimous consent request because it 
would legislate areas that should be left to the administration based 
upon the recommendations of our health professionals.
  Secondly, as I look at the legislation that the unanimous consent 
would adopt, it goes well beyond COVID-19 vaccines. It goes to wearing 
a mask, having a legislative prohibition about requiring a page to wear 
a mask.
  That is pretty broad. We don't know what is coming. We don't know 
what our requirements are going to be and needs to deal with public 
health in this institution. Again, that should be left to the health 
professionals. We shouldn't be micromanaging what the health 
professionals tell us is in the best interests of the people who work 
in this institution.
  Let just me point out that COVID-19 cases are rising all over. We 
know that. We don't know what is going to be the best countermeasures 
in order to deal with that, but we do know that vaccinations, testing, 
and masking are effective countermeasures to reduce the spread of 
COVID-19 and other respiratory diseases.
  I recognize that Senator Paul has put into his comments studies that 
he has quoted. The overwhelming evidence that has been presented by the 
health professionals globally, including here in the United States, is 
that vaccinations, testing, and masking are effective.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record 
the listing of those types of studies that would counter what Senator 
Paul has said.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

COVID-19 Studies Regarding Countermeasure Effectiveness for Adolescents

       COVID-19 Vaccination Protects Children and Adolescents (The 
     Lancet, Sept 2022), https://www.thelancet.com/journals/
laninf/article/PIIS1473-30992200575-8/fulltext
       Effectiveness of mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines in Adolescents Over 
     6 Months (Pediatrics, Nov 2022), https://
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3594567/
 Vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization among 
     adolescent and pediatric SARS-CoV-2 cases between May 2021 
     and January 2022 in Ontario, Canada: A retrospective cohort 
     study (PLoS One, 2023) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/
articles/PMC10065234/
 Effectiveness of BNT162b2 COVID-19 vaccination in Children 
     and Adolescents (Pediatrics, April 2023), https://
publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/151/5/e2022060894/
191035/Effectiveness-of-BNT162b2-COVID-19-Vaccination-
in?autologincheck=redirected
       Safety of COVID-19 Vaccination in United States Children 
     Ages 5 to 11 Years. Pediatrics. 2022 Jul 14. https://doi.org/
10.1542/peds.2022-057313.
       An evidence review of face masks against COVID-19 (Proc 
     Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2021) doi: 10.1073/pnas.2014564118. 
     PMID: 33431650; PMCID: PMC7848583.
       Association of Country-wide Coronavirus Mortality with 
     Demographics, Testing, Lockdowns, and Public Wearing of Masks 
     (Am J Trop Med Hyg. 2020) doi: 10.4269/ajtmh.20-1015. Epub 
     2020 Oct 26. PMID: 33124541; PMCID: PMC7695060.
       Effectiveness Associated With BNT162b2 Vaccine Against 
     Emergency Department and Urgent Care Encounters for Delta and 
     Omicron SARS-CoV-2 Infection Among Adolescents Aged 12 to 17 
     Years (Aug 2022), https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35921109/.
       Effectiveness of mRNA-1273 bivalent (Original and Omicron 
     BA.4/BA.5) COVID-19 2 vaccine in preventing hospitalizations 
     for COVID-19, medically attended SARS-CoV-2 3 infections, and 
     hospital death in the United States, https://www.medrxiv.org/
content/10.1101/2023.05.25.23290456v1.full.pdf
       Vaccine Effectiveness, School Reopening, and Risk of 
     Omicron Infection Among Adolescents Aged 12-17 Years (Journal 
     of Adolescent Health, January 2023), https://
www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1054139X22006437.
       Science Brief: Community Use of Masks to Control the Spread 
     of SARS-CoV-2 (CDC 2021 ), https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/
2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/masking-science-
sarscov2.html.
  Mr. CARDIN. Mr. President, schools throughout and the Nation 
implement public health requirements to keep students, teachers, and 
their communities safe. Let me remind my colleagues, the pages are in 
the Page School. They should be treated no differently, as far as the 
protection of their health, than other students around the Nation and 
those responsible for their safekeeping.
  We need to follow science. We need to follow what science tells us we 
should do. We shouldn't respond to the political whim or the political 
pressures. We should let science make the judgments that keep our 
people safe, particularly our Senate pages.
  There is no credible evidence that supports a prohibition on 
requiring COVID-19 vaccinations, testing, or masking. In contrast, 
overwhelming evidence indicates that they are important tools in 
helping to deal with these issues.
  I will mention one other issue just in passing because I know we are 
going to get to debate on the floor soon about the spending programs 
for our country and how we are dealing with the costs. Well, there are 
a lot of healthcare costs that we would like to get contained. Every 
time we don't deal with the spread of an illness or a disease, it adds 
to the costs to the taxpayers of this country.
  The Senate has a duty of care with respect to the pages. Their well-
being is our responsibility. For those reasons, I object.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
  The Senator from Kentucky.
  Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, the argument has been made that we should 
leave these decisions up to a doctor. Well, the thing is that in 
America we don't appoint like a doctor as dictator. We don't appoint 
one doctor. You get a choice. You get to choose your doctor. If you 
don't like your doctor's advice, you think your doctor's advice is 
invalid, such as it is in this case, you go to another doctor.
  In a free country, the decisions are made by individuals, and each 
individual will assess their risk.
  Now, the argument has been made that there is overwhelming evidence 
on the record. That is just, frankly, untrue. There is no evidence--and 
I don't say that lightly--zero--there are zero studies in any of the 
scientific literature that show that a booster for adolescents reduces 
transmission, hospitalization, or death--zero.
  They only approved the booster to allow you to make the choice of 
using it by saying that you make antibodies. Making antibodies proves 
that vaccines work, which no one disputes. Vaccines work to induce the 
production of antibodies. But the question is, If you have already had 
COVID, do you need three vaccines if you are a 15-year-old kid? The 
answer in all the literature is, you don't need that vaccine.
  What we found today--he says: Oh, this isn't partisan. Certainly, it 
is partisan. Do you see any Republicans over here objecting? The 
Republicans unanimously support getting rid of this mandate. The 
Democrats are objecting because the Democrats don't think that

[[Page S4252]]

individual Americans are smart enough to make their own decisions. The 
Democrats don't think that these kids and their parents and their 
doctors can make their decision. They don't believe in choice when it 
comes to medical decision making. They believe that they know better.
  But in this case, it isn't just a matter of taking something that is 
ineffective; it is mandating a vaccine that threatens the health and 
well-being of these kids--not just a vaccine, mandating three vaccines 
with no mention of even whether the kids have already had COVID, which 
is essentially another inoculation.
  So this is a disappointing day, but this is consistent with what we 
have seen time and again, whether it is having a nationwide emergency 
mandating that you wear masks in school, masks on planes, vaccines 
here, vaccines there. This is a desire by the majority party to control 
your life, to control your medical decision making because they know 
better.
  They want to beg off and say this is about the science. I recited 15 
different studies for them. They didn't recite one study because no 
study exists saying that three vaccines for kids reduces 
hospitalization, transmission, or death. There is no science. Large, 
nationwide studies of this problem have gotten a dozen countries to say 
we shouldn't be giving three vaccines to kids. Half of Europe won't 
allow you to do it. They won't allow the mandates.
  The argument is made, oh, well, we have to do what everybody is doing 
in schools. Even the colleges--90 percent of the colleges aren't 
requiring this. This was a bad mandate from the beginning. Most of the 
colleges have woken up and understand now, one, that this is America 
and you ought to be able to make your own medical decisions, but, two, 
that the science points towards booster vaccine mandates actually being 
a threat to the health and well-being of adolescents.
  I am very disappointed, but I think this illustrates where we are in 
America, where one party thinks they are smarter than every American, 
smarter than every individual, and they will make your medical 
decisions for you.
  I rest my case.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Hawaii.