For Immediate Release: January 13, 2022
Supreme Court Blocks COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate for Workers at Large Companies, Allows Mandate for Healthcare Workers
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In a pair of mixed rulings, the U.S. Supreme Court has temporarily halted the Biden Administration’s COVID-19 vaccine-or-test mandate imposed on the nation’s largest employers while allowing a similar vaccine mandate to proceed for healthcare workers.
In a 6-3 ruling in National Federation of Independent Business v. Department of Labor, the Supreme Court acknowledged that OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) may have exceeded its authority when it ordered companies with 100 or more workers to require that employees receive a COVID-19 vaccine or be tested weekly and wear face masks. The Court noted that “Although COVID-19 is a risk that occurs in many workplaces, it is not an occupational hazard in most. COVID–19 can and does spread at home, in schools, during sporting events, and everywhere else that people gather. That kind of universal risk is no different from the day-to-day dangers that all face from crime, air pollution, or any number of communicable diseases.” However, in Biden v. Missouri, a 5-4 Court ruled that the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) has the statutory authority to require that healthcare providers comply with the COVID-19 vaccine mandate for their employees as a condition of receiving Medicare and Medicaid funding.
“These rulings reinforce the haphazard state of affairs right now when it comes to these COVID-19 vaccine mandates,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “At a time when COVID-19 cases are surging even among the vaccinated, causing the efficacy of the vaccines and boosters to be called into question, the government and private employers need to reconsider the heavy-handed nature of these mandates, which violate every constitutional safeguard for privacy, bodily integrity and religious freedom.”
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