This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
Despite the purported end-of-an-era for vaccine mandates, the COVID-19 shot requirement is still enforced at the Veterans Health Administration.
On May 9, 2023, former president Joe Biden issued Executive Order 14099 – "Moving Beyond COVID-19 Vaccination Requirements for Federal Workers." His order revoked a previous executive order dated Sept. 9, 2021, which once required COVID-19 injections for federal employees.
However, months before Biden's 2021 federal worker mandate, the Department of Veterans Affairs had already instituted its own COVID-19 vaccine requirement for frontline healthcare workers. On July 26, 2021, VA Secretary Denis McDonough announced that all Veterans Health Administration employees providing direct patient care – such as physicians, nurses, and dentists – would be required to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. This was formalized in VHA Directive 1193 on Aug. 13, 2021, and made the VA the first federal agency to mandate COVID-19 vaccination. This mandate for healthcare workers operated independently from Biden's later federal employee order.
Following the federal mandate, on Oct. 4, 2021, the Department of Veterans Affairs issued VA Notice 22-01 "to inform employees of the recent requirement to certify COVID-19 vaccination status and provide proof of vaccination or request an exception within the established timeframes or face disciplinary action, up to and including removal from the Department."
Despite Biden's 2023 rescission of the requirement, VA Notice 24-11 reveals the COVID-19 shot requirement "remains in effect" for the Veterans Health Administration or VHA.
The notice references VHA Directive 1193.01, which took effect on Jan. 27, 2022, and continues to require COVID-19 vaccination for all VHA healthcare personnel. This directive is not a holdover from Biden's federal worker mandate, but rather a continuation of the VA's independent healthcare worker requirement that began in July 2021.
The VA's lack of initiative to rescind the requirement appears to fly in the face of today's presidential agenda. On more than one occasion in recent years, President Donald Trump has signaled opposition to vaccine mandates. Most recently, Trump signed an executive order to block federal money for schools with COVID-19 shot mandates. Newly confirmed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is in agreement.
WorldNetDaily spoke to combat vet and federal whistleblower Sonny Fleeman, who emphasized that his views are solely his own and do not reflect the official policies or positions of the VA, the government or any organization with which he has been affiliated.
If a person works in a VA medical center or any VHA facility, Fleeman explained, he or she is still required to be "vaccinated" against COVID-19 unless the individual has provided an approved exemption.
"This policy remains in effect nationally at all VA healthcare facilities unless it is officially rescinded or replaced," Fleeman disclosed. It is his hope that VA Secretary Doug Collins will take appropriate action and revoke the "COMMIE mandate" to get the shot.
"As long as vaccine mandates remain in place in healthcare," Fleeman argued, "they normalize medical coercion and create the false appearance that the shots must be safe." He adds, "The public looks at healthcare workers being forced to comply and thinks, 'If the people who know medicine best are still required to take it, it must be fine.'" And to this, he says, "That illusion blinds people to the growing evidence of harm and makes it nearly impossible for the injured to be believed."
"But what the public doesn't see is that last time I checked, around 40,000 VA employees – many of them medical professionals – requested exemptions from the COVID-19 shot," Fleeman told WND. "These are the very people on the frontlines, seeing the reality up close."
"Their objections are being buried under the weight of the mandate," he asserted. "Worse, these mandates don't just hide the harm – they keep the system in place so the government can roll them out on the entire public again, whenever they choose. Healthcare is the beachhead, [and] if we don't defeat mandates there, we leave the door open for mandates to sweep through our country again."
Fleeman explained further, "The fact that the VA's healthcare-specific mandate was crafted months before Biden's broader federal worker mandate – and has survived long after other agencies abandoned such requirements – exposes a deeper problem." It reveals, he said, that the VA, particularly within its healthcare system, has become "institutionalized with a dangerous and irrational vaccine advocacy bias." And this bias has "embedded a culture of medical mandates that operates independently of shifting national policy or mounting evidence of harm."
The VA's stubborn insistence on keeping the mandate, even as other federal agencies have stepped back, suggests that the VA is not merely enforcing policy – it is zealously protecting "the pseudo vaccine" itself, elevating its defense of the shot above the well-being of both veterans and healthcare workers, Fleeman suggested. "This raises urgent questions about whether the VA is safeguarding health, or serving as an ideological stronghold for pharmaceutical interests and government control."
