In late 2021, I quit my lucrative C-suite position at a thriving biopharmaceutical company because the CEO had imposed a draconian COVID-19 mandate on all employees — get vaxxed or you’re fired! In doing so, I forfeited millions in salary and stock options, not to mention a job I loved.
Americans should not have to choose between their livelihoods on the one hand and their conscience, religious beliefs, and medical freedom on the other. And yet that’s precisely what my company and scores of others forced their employees to do.
As Anthony Fauci — who got Covid despite six shots — cockily boasted: “It’s been proven that when you make it difficult for people in their lives, they lose their ideological bullshit and they get vaccinated.”
Authoritarian government bureaucrats and woke CEOs had their marching orders from Fauci: go forth and coerce.
Fast-forward to July 2025: I have just joined the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as its chief of staff. One of OCR’s most important missions is to protect the civil, conscience, and religious freedom rights of all Americans from authoritarian diktats imposed upon Americans by recipients of HHS funds. And OCR is now in a position to help ensure this Hobbesian “your livelihood or your conscience” choice is never again forced on Americans, either with respect to unwarranted medical intrusions or any other matter of sincere belief.
During the Biden years, the federal government did nothing to help Americans who were coerced to receive the COVID shot as a condition of their employment. To the contrary, Biden attempted to mandate the shot for all companies with more than 100 employees. And the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services mandated shots for staff at all Medicare- and Medicaid-participating providers.
To add insult to injury, OCR during that time actively aided and abetted the Covid regime with an obsessive focus on “identity” and “equity” rather than on civil, conscience and religious rights.
For example, in guidance issued December 2021 entitled “Legal Standards Prohibiting Race, Color and National Origin Discrimination in COVID-19 Vaccination Programs,” HHS OCR under the Biden administration noted that “fully vaccinated White people appear more likely to have received a booster shot” and that “years of discrimination have contributed to these and other long standing health care disparities.”
Identity politics, 24/7/365. Yet not one iota of support for vulnerable people of all backgrounds who feared they would lose their jobs if they did not get the jab.
That has changed.
Under the current administration, OCR is once again focused relentlessly on protecting the civil, conscience and religious liberties of all Americans against assaults from HHS-funded programs and entities, as well as on safeguarding the privacy of and access to their medical records.
OCR now focuses not on ensuring that citizens achieve “equity” in receiving experimental drugs that they or need, but rather on protecting their civil, conscience and religious rights to reject such intrusions.
But freedom from medical coercion is just one part of OCR’s current mission —which, building on my own experience during the COVID era, I am privileged to help implement now.
As evidenced by its actions thus far in 2025, OCR now sides with Americans confronting multitudes of grave threats to their civil, conscience and religious liberties, including:
- Protections against coercing healthcare workers to participate in medical procedures that violate their conscience rights, including abortions, sterilizations, and transgender surgeries.
- Safeguarding disclosure of private health information while also protecting the right of Americans to timely access their own medical records.
- Combating discrimination against girls coerced to play against boys in sports.
- Fostering the rights of disabled people to move from institutions to homes in the community.
- Aiding students faced with discrimination and attacks, such as those battling antisemitism.
MOST AMERICANS NOT GETTING COVID-19 BOOSTER THIS FALL, SURVEY SAYS
My experience opposing utterly useless and immoral vaccine mandates compelled me to pursue opportunities to make Americans facing similar dilemmas realize they are not alone. Under the leadership of President Donald Trump, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and OCR Director Paula Stannard, I am delighted to be in a position to do so.
We’ve got Americans’ backs.
John Soriano currently serves as Chief of Staff at the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
