On November 12, 2021, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed its decision to stay (pause) the COVID-19 vaccine mandate that President Biden issued via the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OHSA). You can read the decision here.
The court had several reasons for finding the mandate unlawful, including the following:
[T]he Mandate’s strained prescriptions combine to make it the rare government pronouncement that is both overinclusive (applying to employers and employees in virtually all industries and workplaces in America, with little attempt to account for the obvious differences between the risks facing, say, a security guard on a lonely night shift, and a meatpacker working shoulder to shoulder in a cramped warehouse) and underinclusive (purporting to save employees with 99 or more coworkers from a “grave danger” in the workplace, while making no attempt to shield employees with 98 or fewer coworkers from the very same threat). The Mandate’s stated impetus—a purported “emergency” that the entire globe has now endured for nearly two years, and which OSHA itself spent nearly two months responding to—is unavailing as well.
With regard to the supposed “emergency” that could justify the OHSA rule, the court added:
And, of course, this all assumes that COVID-19 poses any significant danger to workers to begin with; for the more than seventy-eight percent of Americans aged 12 and older either fully or partially inoculated against it, the virus poses—the Administration assures us—little risk at all.
As with the President Biden’s use of the CDC to ban evictions for non-payment of rent, this latest attempt to usurp the legislative function has failed, for the time being anyway.
Adam Schultz, photographer
Official portrait of President Joe Biden, taken in the Library room at the White House
Peter Vickery, Esq., 