Following Joe Biden’s angry, threatening announcement of a coming COVID-19 vaccine mandate for all private businesses with 100 or more employees, the country was largely left in limbo. Some wondered if the OSHA rule would ever come. Was this just a PR stunt to get businesses to preemptively comply with a mandate that ultimately didn’t exist?
It seems that we now know the solution. OSHA has completed its initial rule and sent it to OMB for approval. It is an important step toward finalizing this mandate. This could result in millions being forced from work over the next few months.
Biden employer vaccine mandate a step closer to reality as OSHA submits rule text to OMB for reviewhttps://t.co/9UyJNJqOTL
— Fox News (@FoxNews) October 13, 2021
“The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has been working expeditiously to develop an emergency temporary standard that covers employers with 100 or more employees to ensure their workers are fully vaccinated or undergo weekly testing to protect employees from the spread of coronavirus in the workplace,” a Department of Labor spokesperson said in a statement. “On Tuesday, October 12, as part of the regulatory review process, the agency submitted the initial text of the emergency temporary standard to the Office of Management and Budget.”
The administration seems to be trying to give the appearance that they go through normal rule-making processes. This could help avoid going up against the precedents set by the Supreme Court during Trump’s years with respect the Administrative Procedures Act. Even if the emergency provision is used, however, this would face opposition from the courts. More than 20 Republican attorneys general have vowed to fight the mandate, which they call “disastrous.”
Still, in the midst of all the arguments over liberty and legality, both of which are extremely important aspects of this to consider, I’m still struck by just how dumb and unnecessary this all is from a practical standpoint. The original justification for the mandate, as expressed during Biden’s speech, was that the “vaccinated” needed to be “protected” from the “unvaccinated.” Yet, the vaccinated not only spread COVID but there’s more and more evidence they spread it at around the same rate as the unvaccinated. That would make sense given the extremely high caseloads we’ve experienced recently despite having over 75% of adults with at least one dose of the vaccine.
Mandates are useless. It is not necessary to keep the unvaccinated safe if everybody spreads COVID-19. You would rather protect the unvaccinated. From the vaccinatedThis would also mean that there are no effective lockdowns. Again, it negates the federally-declared employer mandate.
The whole idea of protecting the vaccine-vaccinated also seems absurd. The vaccines don’t work to prevent transmission, but they do work to prevent serious illness and death. Individuals are protected by vaccination. The possibility of breakthrough cases is inevitable after that. Mandates are not based upon science. They are simply coerced into complying with baseless government demands.
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