In a FREE country with a government of the people, for the people and by the people, there is no such thing as a “government mandate”.
You can take that to the bank!
There is no such thing as a completely "free" country in that all countries have rules (mandates). You must obey certain laws, you must defend the country when called upon to do so (military draft), you must obey the government when the government decides that a required action is necessary for the general safety of the populous (like, in this case, the vax).
What was strange here was that going into the COVID "emergency," certain parties (the Democrats, the media, the health infrastructure) started lying right from the start. And after Trump's voters were ceremoniously denied victory in the election, Americans had good reason to believe that we were in the midst of a coup...and therefore everything coming out of the government was potentially a lie in the furtherance of that coup.