Appeals Court Extends Block on Biden’s Vaccine Mandate for Employers

“Today’s decision is just the beginning of the process for review of this important OSHA standard,” she said in a statement. “The department will continue to vigorously defend the standard and looks forward to obtaining a definitive resolution following consolidation of all of the pending cases for further review.”

President Biden announced in September that his administration would issue the mandate as one of several steps to try to increase immunization rates and end the pandemic, which so far has killed about 750,000 Americans. Other mandates applied to federal employees and federal contractors.

In early November, OSHA, which is part of the Labor Department, issued the standard for companies with at least 100 employees. It would force them to require unvaccinated employees to wear masks indoors starting Dec. 5. Employees who remain unvaccinated by Jan. 4 would have to undergo weekly testing at work.

The proposed rule makes an exception for employees who do not come into close contact with other people at their jobs, such as those who work at home or exclusively outdoors.

A coalition of plaintiffs — including several employers and Republican-controlled states — immediately challenged the employer mandate in court. Their lawsuit argued that the mandate was an unlawful overreach that exceeded the authority Congress had legitimately delegated to OSHA.

Among other things, they argued that the agency has no power to regulate protections against exposure to disease, as opposed to workplace hazards like asbestos, and that framing the mandate as a workplace safety effort was just a pretext for the Biden administration’s real motivation: pressuring Americans who have been reluctant to get vaccinated.

Judge Englehardt’s ruling strongly sided with their point of view.

OSHA, he wrote, was created by Congress to ensure safe and healthful working conditions but was not “intended to authorize a workplace safety administration in the deep recesses of the federal bureaucracy to make sweeping pronouncements on matters of public health affecting every member of society in the profoundest of ways.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/12/us/politics/court-vaccine-mandate.html