On Thursday, the Biden administration announced the implementation of a vaccine mandate that would require workers for large companies with more than a hundred employees to either be vaccinated or get tested weekly for Covid-19 as a prerequisite of employment.
“We’re going to protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated co-workers,” President Biden said during a White House briefing following the announcement of the mandate.
The White House hopes that these new requirements will suppress the number of coronavirus cases, hospitalizations, and deaths caused by the virus. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), unvaccinated people are ten times more likely than vaccinated people to be hospitalized and 11 times more likely to die from COVID-19.
Just hours after the announcement of the mandate, the attorneys general from Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee filed a lawsuit against the federal government, asking a judge to stop the order from being implemented.
On Friday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and officials from Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Utah joined together to add their names to the growing list of opponents to the mandate by filing a lawsuit. More lawsuits from several states will be filed in the next few days, led by Georgia and Missouri.
“The Biden administration’s new vaccine mandate on private businesses is a breathtaking abuse of federal power,” Paxton said in a press release. “OSHA has only limited power and specific responsibilities. This latest move goes way outside those bounds. This ‘standard’ is flatly unconstitutional. Bottom line: Biden’s new mandate is bad policy and bad law, and I’m asking the Court to strike it down.”
The mandate sets the deadline of January 4, 2022, for employers to comply and directs the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to take charge in enforcing the new requirement. If employers fail to comply with the order, they will be subject to fines of up to $14,000 per violation.
Some of the other requirements within the new rule are that workers must get paid time off to get vaccinated and that workers who choose to remain unvaccinated must wear face coverings while on the job. It also states that employers will not be required to pay for the weekly testing of employees who decline the vaccine.
The mandate provides a separate rule for healthcare workers, giving them no weekly testing option. Instead, workers at health care facilities that receive federal funding from Medicare or Medicaid must get vaccinated by the January 4 deadline.
This is similar to the Biden administration’s rule for federal workers. Earlier in the year, federal employees were ordered to get vaccinated by November 22, with no weekly testing option.
