Federal employees — including at the White House — must attest to being vaccinated against COVID-19, or else comply with routine testing and mitigation measures. But conservative commentator Charlie Kirk claims that the “White House staff is not required to be vaccinated,” baselessly questioning if undisclosed concerns about the vaccines are at play.
States and certain workplaces can require individuals to be vaccinated.
As legal and public health expert Joanne Rosen of Johns Hopkins University has explained, the legal precedent for states to make vaccinations compulsory goes back to a 1905 Supreme Court case involving the smallpox vaccine. The court sided with the state, finding that the vaccination requirement was a reasonable regulation to protect public health.
Employers are also allowed to require their workers to get a vaccine, if vaccination is reasonably related to a person’s job, such as in the health care industry. In guidance issued in December 2020, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission implied that all employers can have a mandatory vaccination policy, including for COVID-19, as long as employers comply with federal laws stipulating that reasonable accommodations should be made for workers who cannot be immunized because of a disability or religious reason. The matter is likely to be tested in court, as we’ve explained, because the COVID-19 vaccines have yet to be fully licensed.
The federal government cannot issue a vaccine mandate, Rosen told us, but could provide financial incentives for states to do so.
“[T]he Supreme Court has interpreted the Tenth Amendment to prevent the federal government from commandeering or requiring state officers to carry out federal directives,” the Congressional Research Service explained in a 2019 report. “In the context of vaccination, this principle prevents Congress from requiring states or localities to pass mandatory vaccination laws, but it does not impede Congress from using its Spending Clause authority to provide incentives (in the form of federal grants) to states to enact laws concerning vaccination.”
Hundreds of millions of doses of COVID-19 vaccines have now been administered in the U.S. and only a few, very rare, safety concerns have emerged. The vast majority of people experience only minor, temporary side effects such as pain at the injection site, fatigue, headache, or muscle pain — or no side effects at all. As the CDC has said, these vaccines “have undergone and will continue to undergo the most intensive safety monitoring in U.S. history.”
A small number of severe allergic reactions known as anaphylaxis, which are expected with any vaccine, haveoccurred with the authorized COVID-19 vaccines. Fortunately, these reactions are rare, typically occur within minutes of inoculation and can be treated.
As of Jan. 18, there have been 2.5 cases of anaphylaxis per million doses of the Moderna vaccine and 4.7 cases per million of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, according to a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Those who develop anaphylaxis are usually given epinephrine, the drug found in EpiPens. None of these reactions has led to death. On Feb. 26, Johnson & Johnson said it had received a report of one anaphylactic reaction in South Africa.
To make sure serious allergic reactions can be identified and treated, all people receiving a vaccine should be observed for 15 minutes after getting a shot, and anyone who has experienced anaphylaxis or had any kind of immediate allergic reaction to any vaccine or injection in the past should be monitored for a half hour. People who have had a serious allergic reaction to a previous dose or one of the vaccineingredients should not be immunized. Also, those who shouldn’t receive one type of COVID-19 vaccine should be monitored for 30 minutes after receiving a different type of vaccine.
The Johnson & Johnson vaccine has been linked to an increased risk of rare blood clots combined with low levels of blood platelets, primarily in women ages 18 to 49. Early symptoms of the condition, which is known as thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, can appear as late as three weeks after vaccination and include severe or persistent headaches or blurred vision, leg swelling, and easy bruising or tiny blood spots under the skin outside of the injection site.
As of July 12, the syndrome has been confirmed in 38 cases, after more than 12.8 million doses of the J&J vaccine. There have been three deaths linked to the condition, as of May 7, according to the CDC.
In April, the FDA and CDC recommended “a pause in the use” of the vaccine to investigate six reports of the syndrome out of more than 6.8 million immunizations. After a review, which turned up nine more cases, the CDC and FDA determined that the benefits still outweigh the risks and that the pause should be lifted. A warning was nevertheless added to the vaccine’s fact sheet and the CDC has said that women younger than 50 years old “especially should be aware” of the condition and that “that there are other COVID-19 vaccine options available for which this risk has not been seen.” The condition is still rare among the highest-risk group, occurring in around 7 of every million vaccinated adult women below the age of 50.
On July 13, the FDA added warnings tofact sheets on the J&J vaccine about an observed increased risk of the neurological disorder Guillain-Barré Syndrome.
The agency said the chance of developing the syndrome is “very low” but advised J&J vaccine recipients to seek medical attention if they experience symptoms including weakness or tingling, particularly in the legs or arms; difficulty walking or with facial movement; double vision; or bladder control or bowel function issues.
The warning came after preliminary reports of 100 cases, with most people reporting symptoms within 42 days of vaccination. One death was reported, but it isn’t known whether the death or the cases were caused by the vaccine. The FDA said that each year 3,000 to 6,000 people develop the syndrome and most recover fully.
There is emerging evidence that the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna mRNA vaccines may very rarely cause inflammation of the heart muscle (myocarditis) or of the surrounding lining (pericarditis), particularly in young men. In late June, after a review of safety monitoring data, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practicesconcluded there is a “likely association” between COVID-19 mRNA vaccination and the two conditions in teens and young adults.
As of July 12, the agency says there have been 1,047 preliminary reports of either condition in people 30 years old or younger following immunization with any COVID-19 vaccine. The bulk of the reports, which are through the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System and do not necessarily mean the vaccine caused the problem, are with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines and are more common among males and after the second dose.
Health officials have emphasized that the potential vaccine-related myocarditis and pericarditis cases are rare and the benefits of vaccination still outweigh the risks. Early evidence, the committee said, suggests these myocarditis cases are less severe than typical ones. The CDC has also noted that most patients who were treated “responded well to treatment and rest and quickly felt better.”
On July 29, President Joe Biden announced that federal employees and onsite contractors will be asked to attest to their vaccination status — and indicated that those who don’t attest to being fully vaccinated against COVID-19 will be required to comply with other mitigation measures, including routine testing, masking, physical distancing and travel restrictions.
But in a highly viewed video on Facebook and Instagram, a conservative personality railing against vaccine mandates is simply claiming that White House employees are “not required to be vaccinated.”
“It should be the No. 1 news story in the country,” Charlie Kirk claims in his Aug. 20 video, which has accrued more than 2 millionviews. “Did you know that in the White House they are not mandating the vaccine? Did you know that White House staff is not required to get vaccinated?”
He later asks whether some undisclosed safety concerns are behind the purported decision to not require the vaccines: “Do they know something about the vaccine? Why aren’t they mandating it? Are they seeing data that is questionable? Should be worried because they know something we don’t?”
Kirk plays footage in which a reporter asks White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki whether a vaccine mandate for White House staff exists, and Psaki responds, “No, we have not mandated it.”
While there is still not a full-blown vaccine mandate for White House staffers, that exchange is from July 23 — six days before the White House announcement of the so-called “vaccine-or-test” requirement for all federal employees. A White House official confirmed to us that the policy applies to White House staff.
Kirk did not respond to our requests for comment.
The process of actually implementing the federal policy is ongoing among agencies. The Department of Justice, for example, released an Aug. 13 memo that said an electronic form for employees to indicate their vaccination status would “be available soon” and said it was developing a program to facilitate testing.
We asked the White House for more specifics on the policy rollout for its staff — and what percentage of its workers has so far attested to being fully vaccinated — but it didn’t provide us with answers.
On Aug. 23 — following the Food and Drug Administration’s full approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for those 16 and older — Biden urged business leaders and others to implement a similar policy.
“If you’re a business leader, a non-profit leader, a state or local leader who has been waiting for full FDA approval to require vaccinations, I call on you now to do that — require it,” Biden said. “Do what I did last month and require your employees to get vaccinated or face strict requirements.”
A reporter asked Psaki the same day whether a more strict mandate would be implemented for federal employees.
“I think you’re looking more at agency to agency or different factions of the government at this point, but expect there will be more on that front,” Psaki said.
In terms of the attestation policy, the Safer Federal Workforce Task Force instructs agencies to “ask employees to complete the Certification of Vaccination form” to “provide information about their vaccination status and attest to the truthfulness of that information. Individuals who do not complete the form will be treated as not fully vaccinated for purposes of agency safety protocols.”
Employees who make a false statement on the form risk being fired and are also committing a federal crime, according to the task force.
The task force also directs agencies to “establish a screening testing program for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, to test Federal employees and contractor employees who work onsite and who are not fully vaccinated or who have declined to provide their vaccination information. Enrollment in this testing program is mandatory for those individuals and they must be tested at least once a week.”
Employees who refuse to take a test may face “disciplinary measures,” it adds, and could be barred from “the agency workplace for the safety of others pending resolution of any disciplinary or other action the agency may pursue.”
Editor’s note: SciCheck’s COVID-19/Vaccination Project is made possible by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The foundation has no control over FactCheck.org’s editorial decisions, and the views expressed in our articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the foundation. The goal of the project is to increase exposure to accurate information about COVID-19 and vaccines, while decreasing the impact of misinformation.
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