Colin
WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – The number of states taking the Biden administration to court over its COVID-19 vaccine mandate for healthcare workers is now up to 22, across two different joint suits.
On September 9, President Joe Biden announced a series of vaccine mandates for the public and private sectors alike, including one with no testing option for around 17 million healthcare workers at medical facilities that receive Medicare and Medicaid funding.
Last week, a group of ten states led by Missouri filed a lawsuit against the health worker mandate in federal court; on Monday another coalition of twelve states led by Louisiana filed another one, the Associated Press reports. The suit argues that the mandate exceeds the federal government’s authority under the Constitution and federal law, and will further exacerbate the nation’s ongoing shortage of healthcare workers.
“The federal government will not impose medical tyranny on Louisiana’s people without my best fight,” Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry declared.
Last week, a panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily blocked one of the administration’s other mandates, which required vaccination or weekly testing for any business with 100 workers or more, over “grave statutory and constitutional issues.” The judges ordered the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to “take no steps to implement or enforce” the ETS “until further court order.” The agency says it will comply for the time being.
Critically, the Louisiana suit cites language from that ruling of the Fifth Circuit, who will hear this case as well if U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty’s eventual ruling is appealed.
All told, Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming are suing the administration over the health worker mandate so far. A total of 26 states are suing the private employee mandate, as well.
Meanwhile, evidence continues to mount undermining the vaccine mandate’s rationale, with a growing body of data indicating that the mass vaccination strategy for defeating COVID-19 has failed. The federal government considers more than 194 million Americans (58% of the eligible) to be “fully vaccinated” (a moving target given the vaccines’ temporary nature), yet ABC News reported on October 6 that more Americans died of COVID-19 this year (353,000) than in all of 2020 (352,000), according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
By contrast, more than 100 studies have found, contrary to the insistence of the federal government and the mainstream press, that COVID immunity from prior infection “is equal to or more robust and superior to existing vaccine.” The U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) admitted last week that it does not have any examples on file of an unvaccinated American transmitting COVID-19 to another person following natural recovery.
Beyond doubts about the COVID shots’ necessity, significant concerns remain about their safety, stemming largely from the fact that they were developed and released far faster than any previous vaccine.
Defenders stress that their development did not start from scratch, but rather relied on years of prior research into mRNA technology; and that one of the innovations of Operation: Warp Speed was conducting various aspects of the development process concurrently rather than sequentially, eliminating delays unrelated to safety. However, those factors do not fully account for the condensing of clinical trial phases — each of which can take anywhere from 1–3 years on their own — to just three months apiece.
While cases of severe harm reported to the federal Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) after taking COVID shots represent less than one percent of total doses administered in the United States, a 2010 report submitted to the US Department of Health & Human Services’ (HHS) Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) warned that VAERS caught “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events.” May reporting from NBC News quotes several mainstream experts acknowledging “gaps” in federal vaccine monitoring.
As of October 29, 2021, there have been over 850,000 injuries from coronavirus shots reported to the U.S. government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System.
Biden admin pauses enforcement of employer vaccine mandate after court order
WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – The United States Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) announced this week that it will comply with a federal judge’s order to hold off enforcing President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for tens of millions of Americans.
On September 9, Biden announced that he was directing OSHA to draft a rule to “require all employers with 100 or more employees to ensure their workforce is fully vaccinated or require any workers who remain unvaccinated to produce a negative test result on at least a weekly basis before coming to work.”
Almost two months later, OSHA released the official details of the rule, which will take effect January 4, 2022. It is expected to affect around 84 million employees from around 1.9 million private businesses, further exacerbating staffing shortages across the U.S. economy.
Twenty-six states have filed lawsuits against the mandate, as have employers such as the Daily Wire and affected workers such as airline pilots. Last week, a panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily blocked the mandate over “grave statutory and constitutional issues,” then rejected a Biden administration appeal to lift the stay, finding that the mandate “grossly exceeds OSHA’s statutory authority.”
Judge Kurt Engelhardt wrote that the mandate “threatens to substantially burden the liberty interests of reluctant individual recipients” as well as the companies forced to impose it. Further, he wrote, Congress did not intend OSHA “to make sweeping pronouncements on matters of public health affecting every member of society in the profoundest of ways.”
The Fifth Circuit ordered OSHA to “take no steps to implement or enforce” the Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) “until further court order.” In an update on the DOL website, OSHA says it will comply: “OSHA has suspended activities related to the implementation and enforcement of the ETS pending future developments in the litigation.”
The agency did say that it “remains confident in its authority” to impose the mandate, and will continue to accept general public comments on the mandate until December 6. While the announcement does not mean the controversy is resolved, it does mean that employers will not be able to shift the blame for their own vaccine mandates onto the federal government unless and until the Fifth Circuit’s judgment is reversed.
Meanwhile, evidence continues to mount undermining the vaccine mandate’s rationale, with a growing body of data indicating that the mass vaccination strategy for defeating COVID-19 has failed. The federal government considers more than 194 million Americans (58% of the eligible) to be “fully vaccinated” (a moving target given the vaccines’ temporary nature), yet ABC News reported on October 6 that more Americans died of COVID-19 this year (353,000) than in all of 2020 (352,000), according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
By contrast, more than 100 studies have found, contrary to the insistence of the federal government and the mainstream press, that COVID immunity from prior infection “is equal to or more robust and superior to existing vaccine.” The U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) admitted last week that it does not have any examples on file of an unvaccinated American transmitting COVID-19 to another person following natural recovery.
Beyond doubts about the COVID shots’ necessity, significant concerns remain about their safety, stemming largely from the fact that they were developed and released far faster than any previous vaccine.
Defenders stress that their development did not start from scratch, but rather relied on years of prior research into mRNA technology; and that one of the innovations of Operation: Warp Speed was conducting various aspects of the development process concurrently rather than sequentially, eliminating delays unrelated to safety. However, those factors do not fully account for the condensing of clinical trial phases — each of which can take anywhere from 1–3 years on their own — to just three months apiece.
While cases of severe harm reported to the federal Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) after taking COVID shots represent less than one percent of total doses administered in the United States, a 2010 report submitted to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services’ (HHS) Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) warned that VAERS caught “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events.” May reporting from NBC News quotes several mainstream experts acknowledging “gaps” in federal vaccine monitoring.
As of October 29, 2021, there have been over 850,000 injuries from coronavirus shots reported to the VAERS.
