Supreme Court Mandates Rulings: Read Them For Yourself
Panorama of the west facade of United States Supreme Court Building at dusk in Washington, D.C., USA 10 October 2011. Photo by Joe Ravi, CC BY-SA 3.0
The anxiously awaited Supreme Court Mandates Rulings in regards to cases aimed at the Biden Administrations vaccine requirements have blocked the measures for private companies while upholding them for healthcare workers.
The Supreme Court on Thursday blocked the Biden administration from enforcing its sweeping vaccine-or-test requirements for large private companies, but allowed similar requirements to stand for medical facilities that take Medicare or Medicaid payments.
The rulings came three days after the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s emergency measure started to take effect.
That mandate required that workers at businesses with 100 or more employees must get vaccinated or submit a negative Covid test weekly to enter the workplace. It also required unvaccinated workers to wear masks indoors at work.
“Although Congress has indisputably given OSHA the power to regulate occupational dangers, it has not given that agency the power to regulate public health more broadly,” the court wrote in an unsigned opinion.
“Requiring the vaccination of 84 million Americans, selected simply because they work for employers with more than 100 employees, certainly falls in the latter category,” the court wrote.
OSHA, which polices workplace safety for the Labor Department, issued the mandates under its emergency power established by Congress. OSHA can shortcut the normal rulemaking process, which can take years, if the Labor secretary determines a new workplace safety standard is necessary to protect workers from a grave danger.
The Biden administration argued before the high court Friday that the rules were necessary to address the “grave danger” posed by the Covid pandemic. Liberal justices, clearly sympathetic to the government’s position, highlighted the devastating death toll from the pandemic and the unprecedented wave of infection rolling across the nation due to the omicron variant.
But the court’s 6-3 conservative majority expressed deep skepticism about the federal government’s move.
The opinion blocking Biden’s vaccinate-or-test employer mandate by a 6–3 vote:
Supreme Court MandatesThe opinion upholding Biden’s vaccinate mandate for health care workers by a 5–4 vote, with Roberts and Kavanaugh joining the liberals:
Supreme Court Mandates
A 6-3 vote? I wonder who the 6 were.Report
I’m amused by all the reporting and commentary on this – because these aren’t decisions on the merits, just whether the mandates can or can’t stay in place as litigation proceeds.Report
Not super surprising. The CMS rule isn’t a stretch of the agency’s mandate the way the OSHA rule is.Report
The “reasonable and prudent person” might think that an agency named Occupational Safety and Health Administration did, in fact, have the mandate to make such decisions.Report
Via police powers! For the 100,000 Children In Hospitals!
(Sotomayor opened her mouth, and removed all doubt).Report
With 750 million new cases per day, that many children being hospitalized was inevitable.Report
This may be hard to accept, but the name of an agency doesn’t factor in to the analysis of its statutory mandate.Report
I am very well aware.Report
It’s completely and totally idiotic. I work from home. I do not meet coworkers, I do not meet patients.
Please, tell me again why the CMS should be able to mandate my vaccination? They have zero, zilch, nada justification for this. It does not affect patient care in the slightest.
I am being more responsible than you — and reading more research papers, and watching more people die.Report
Please, tell me again why the CMS should be able to mandate my vaccination?
They didn’t. The rule provides exemptions for religious reasons, medical reasons, and for people who work full time from home.Report
CMS sets numerous standards for reimbursement eligibility. There are exceptions as Michael noted. But the other simple out is to stop accepting money from federal healthcare programs.Report
Oh look, you opened your mouth in indignation about something you knew nothing about.
Will you change your tune now that someone pointed out that you, as a full time WFH employee, were exempt?
of course not.Report
“It is not our role to weigh such tradeoffs. In our system of government, that is the responsibility of those chosen by the people through democratic processes.”Report
“Though the VRA is right out.”Report
We have elections pretty often. OSHA is led by people appointed by elected officials. Biden was elected. Elected officials put forth a policy, Supremes say the people are elected should make rules but stop the regs from a agency run by a person who answers to the Sec of Labor.
I know this has become a popular conservative point but it’s circular and doesn’t make any sense as presented.Report
Appointed officials put forward a policy that the legislative branch didn’t give them the power to do.Report
We live in interesting times. The SCOTUS seems set to finish establishing a “doctrine of important questions” saying that some matters are so important that Congress cannot delegate decision-making on them.
I expect it to get a good workout next month, when the Court hears West Virginia v. EPA and consolidated cases. Demonstrating my own biases by phrasing, I expect the Court will rule that any action large enough to be effective against greenhouse gas emissions is too important for Congress to delegate.Report
I don’t think that’s a fair reading, and I don’t mean I think it’s partisan. It’s just inaccurate. They go on for pages presenting that Congress *did* not, not that Congress *can* not.Report
Except as I note below, Congress DID.Report
You laid out nicely that it didn’t. I mean, thanks for providing the documentation, but there’s nothing in it that would challenge the majority opinion.Report
SO you contend – as sadly does SCOTUS – that Congress telling the secretary of labor to issue regulations isn’t a delegation of decisional authority? Or do you contend – as they also do, that even when done clearly, Congress Can’t delegate authority?
I mean as feds, when we receive federal law training, we are told over and over that when Congress says our agency SHALL do something, its not optional.Report
Article 1, Section 8:
Further, Article 2, section 3 is pretty clear that the President shall faithfully execute the laws of the land.
You know, the SHALLS that Congress writes.Report
Philip, I contend that the majority is right, and the majority didn’t write what you’re saying they did.Report
That’s an interesting take on originalism – We, SCOTUS, have decided that Congress CAN’T do the thing the Constitution tells it to do, which is direct the Executive by passing laws. I guess its one way to further degrade the regulatory state that conservatives find so onerous.Report
That doctrine will hold up until the next time the GOP controls the white house with a Democratic Congress.
I for one, eagerly await the decision from Justice Howler Monkey entitled “it is okay when you are Republican.”Report
The Legislative Branch didn’t, so far as I know, prohibit it either.
That’s the opening of the OSHA Act of 1970, what we call the organic act. Seems to me, simply based on that, that OSHA has purview, in that rampant COVID outbreaks impact the health of the workers in a workplace.
Again, COVID outbreak arise in workplaces – hospitals around the US are currently experiencing this, as are school districts. In the early days, we had numerous reports of outbreaks in meatpacking and poultry plants.
And there Congress tells the Labor Secretary to create these regulations. In unusually plain language.
Carrying it further, Congress directed the new agency to:
And then Congress told the Secretary to use the new agency to look at health in the workplace, separate from occupational issues.
Down in Section 6 we see:
Which means the Secretary of Labor HAS TO ISSUE regulations comporting with this standard. Equally important the Secretary is required by law to do so in the way that protects the most people.
Bottom line – Congress was quite clear in 1970 what they wanted OSHA to do in instances like this. SCOTUS clearly disagrees with that. But the appointed officials certainly look like they are on solid ground.Report
The Six Horsemen of the Aplocalypse. Say what you will about Locernism, at least it is an ethos.Report
Google gives no results for that word.Report
Be glad you aren’t a lawyer for Sandia Labs. Every time they ask for “Additional Documentation” for religious exemptions, they get 50 pages. Per Objector.
… they’re “pausing” the mandate, believe it or not. Think they got sandbagged by the nuclear physicists.Report
The elephant in the room is the fact that tens of millions of people have embraced the plague rats of misinformation and refuse to abide by even the simplest acts of pandemic hygiene like wearing a mask.
Aided, abetted, and fueled by the Republican Party and Fox News media empire.Report
Do you think that AOC was driven to mask violation by the mere presence of all those Florida Republicans?
The elephant in the room is omicron. Likely every covid fact that was true 6 weeks ago will be false in 6 weeks. Any emotional justification for a federal mandate is also likely history. The law remains the law. Not only would we do more damage by throwing away the law than we would by enforcing mandates, there’s little reason to think that mandates would affect the course of the pandemic at this point at all.Report
A couple hundred thousand Americans are dead today because of the tsunami of misinformation spread by the Republican Party and Fox News.
To spread this flood of propaganda was a willful choice, freely made by Republicans for short term political advantage.Report
You don’t think that something that’d lead to more vaccinations would have an impact on the pandemic? How do you figure?Report
I think we’re very close to the end of the story. Just looking at the raw numbers, they’ve been breaking that little Google chart’s software, with one-day new cases in some areas four times higher than any previous seven-day average. Still, the number of deaths hold steady or decline relative to last year’s seasonal pattern. The number of people who would be saved from death by omicron who still work in 100-employee businesses but haven’t gotten the vaccine yet? I don’t see it as a high number.Report
I do agree that omicron is rendering most of the isolation arguments moot- it’s just too contagious to easily avoid. Which is why vaccination is more important than ever. As for deaths, I hope you’re right but fear that they’re coming in the next few weeks. Time will tell.Report
I’ve been watching the numbers as nervously as anyone. I’ve seen some increases in deaths, for example in Canada and the UK. But they pale in comparison to their numbers during the last winter. It’s a real concern: a very-rarely-fatal variant that nearly everyone gets has the potential to cause a lot of deaths. I’m glad I’m vaccinated (and I’m fairly sure my bloodstream has a bunch of recently-arrived antibodies) and I believe in the moral case for the vaccine. But the death rate is:
(percent vaxxed * likelihood of coronavirus when vaxxed * likelihood of death from coronavirus when vaxxed) +
(percent unvaxxed * likelihood of coronavirus when unvaxxed * likelihood of death from coronavirus while unvaxxed)
It looks to me like terms B and E are going to approach 100%, and term F is larger than term C but still fairly small, and the mandate wouldn’t change terms A and D significantly.Report
Two interesting things I noticed today:
1. California is reporting deaths on a three-week lag.
2. The UK publishes two death statistics: Deaths with COVID-19 on the death certificate, and all deaths occurring within 28 days of a positive test. The latter is about three times as large as the former, and it’s also what’s shown on the Worldometers tracker.
I’m not sure how common these practices are, but they suggest caution in interpretation of statistics.Report
There are similar patterns in most US states, as well as in Canada, the UK, Scandinavia, generally across the northern hemisphere’s modern, high-mobility countries. All data is preliminary, always, but the observations are consistent. There have been increases in the number of deaths, but less than in the previous winter. How much of that increase is seasonal? How much lingering delta cases? How much driven by the sheer number of weaker-but-still-potentially-deadly omicron cases? We’ll see if that can be teased out of the data.Report
Covid mostly kills people who already have multiple problems. Lots them died last year. A year isn’t enough time to restock that population.
Note the overall death rate holds steady at 100%.Report
I agree with this. With Omicron, vaccinated / boosted are still contracting and transmitting. I don’t think OSHA is empowered to require employers to mitigate degrees of illness from viruses that can be contracted anywhere.Report
Sure, but vaccinated and boosted people are massively less likely to get seriously ill whereas the unvaxxed are the overwhelming majority of serious cases flooding the healthcare system.Report
This is still a pandemic of the unvaccinated. I have known vaccinated people with Omicron breakthrough infections but they have what appears to be moderate flu like systems. Unpleasant but nothing that needs the hospital.Report
Yea, it’s also the unvaccinated clogging up ICUs and ventilators for no reason other than their personal selfishness.
I’m pretty agnostic on these mandates but not on the ethics of it. Anyone eligible not getting the vaccine is a free-riding a-hole prolonging the pain for everyone else.Report
Agreed.Report
I wouldn’t put it that way, but I agree that the ethical argument for getting the vaccine is very strong.Report
I try not to be overly judgmental about these things. And I’m definitely skeptical of overreach by federal agencies. But this is also getting really old.Report
Antivaxx is a form of Covid denial, which stems from Trump’s original refusal to take it seriously, It’s all fruit of the asshole tree.Report
I will point out what Kagan said. Nearly 1 million Americans have died from COVID. The death count might be higher when you factor in deaths that were not reported properly and/or people who died from other conditions because ICU beds were filled up by COVID patients and continue to be filled up by COVID patients. Public health has been one of the most traditional powers of the state. If this is not necessary and proper, nothing is.Report
Public health has never been protected in this way in our history.Report
See Flu Pandemic, 1918 for the last time we had this intense level of public health impact from a pandemic.Report
Not at the federal level under the guise of an OSHA regulation. You can come at this any way you want to, you can’t get past that.Report
Back in the day, public health used to be protection more vigorously because society accepted the state had a right to trample individuals during pandemics. Rather than have people quarrantine at home, they would be taken to special quarrantine hostels to protect uninfected people that lived with them and everybody else in the neighborhood. And vaccination would be forced.Report
That’s without even factoring in the economic devastation which is continuing even under Omicron.
“Mild” cases still result in higher employee absentee rates and supply chain disruption.Report
A fully vaccinated co-worker got omicron and said it was an extraordinarily bad sickness. You don’t need hospitalization but it isn’t mild either.Report
To reiterate:
1) Over 844,000 Americans are now dead of CVOID. Many of them – probably the majority of them – working age adults.
2) 208.6 Million Americans have been vaccinated
3) Daily cases per 100,000 are now more then double the prior peak in early 2021.
4) Unvaccinated people are around 14 times as likely to get Covid as vaccinated people.
5) Unvaccinated people are being hospitalized at a rate of 67.9 per 100,000; vaccinated people are being hospitalized at a rate of 3.9 per 100,000.
6) Deaths rates per 100,000 in rural areas are 0.71; in urban areas they are 0.54.
This is very much now a pandemic of the unvaccinated and rural America. Its probably only coincidence however that rural America is overwhelmingly Red.Report
But there’s nothing in your reiteration that addresses the Court’s decisions.Report
According to Statista, 75% of the deaths are over the age of 65. 52% are over the age of 75. About half of those are over the age of 85.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-from-covid-by-age-us/
My eyeball look at the graphs suggests the outbreak is doubling every 2 weeks. We’re all going to get it over the next two months.Report
These may have been true of alpha, but I don’t think they were even true of delta, much less omicron. There’s nothing that’s 93% protective against symptomatic omicron infection, except perhaps prior omicron infection. A three-shot course appears to reduce hospitalization by around 90% (still less than you’re claiming), but IIRC the standard two-shot course only gives like 50-70% protection.
Apparently there’s an omicron-targeted vaccine scheduled for March, but that will probably be a bit late.Report
Add to that list: 75% of the vaccinated people who die have 4 comorbidities.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/covid-deaths-4-comorbidities/
Thing is I can’t recall OSHA ever mandating vaccinations in the general workplace. It’s not what they do.
This wasn’t an effort to protect people at work, it was an effort to protect people in general. If and when I get covid, it won’t be from exposure at work.Report
Twitter post from OG and attorney Mark T, arguing that the SCOTUS stay is garbage:
https://twitter.com/Markt_og/status/1481764335391326214
Oh is Mark referring to that whole “harm to the public” factor? Hah hah hah! I’m sure six of them had a good laugh over that in conference.Report
John Roberts, saving conservatives from their own folly since 2005.Report
Technically I think Kavanaugh would be considered the swing on the CMS rule.Report
Note that mandates imposed by a state government or voluntarily by an employer are unaffected by these decisions.
As several have noted above, this means that in Red states where politicians have jumped on the antivax train, we may reasonably expect to see higher rates of infection, transmission, hospitalization, and ultimately death, because freedom. As I’ve opined elsewhere, getting a free vaccination against a potentially debilitating and deadly disease versus losing your job seems to me to be a “would you rather clean toilets or eat ice cream” kind of decision, but others feel differently. I’m not entirely sure the data is that dramatically different, though, and it further seems to me that this state of affairs is probably because COVID is so amazingly transmissible despite the precautions we’ve put in effect (and which a substantial portion of the population shirk or resist).
So what’s really happening here is a setup for a limits-of-Federal-authority argument and that it happens with a rule intended to curb a virulent, novel, potentially deadly disease (see statistics cited by Philip H, supra). I would say “Huh, it turns out the Constitution is a suicide pact after all!” but 1) these are decisions on preliminary injunctions, not final rulings; 2) the disease appears to spread, although more slowly, even in areas where mandates and masking are still required so maybe we’d be facing a death toll similar to what’s actually happening even with a contrary ruling; and 3) a permanent rule that goes through the Administrative Procedures Act process would be facing much better odds under the reasoning here than the emergency rule that’s, at the moment, stayed.
Finally, let’s remember that no one deserves to get COVID and certainly no one deserves to die of COVID. That’s as true of Ron DeSantis as it is of you or I.Report
Ron is vaccinated. He will be fine.Report
“Finally, let’s remember that no one deserves to get COVID and certainly no one deserves to die of COVID. That’s as true of Ron DeSantis as it is of you or I.”
Confession. I have probably taken more glee in sorryantivaxxer.com than is good for the psyche.Report
I would feel worse about the ruling if I thought it mattered more.
Say the gov tells everyone they have until March to get vaccinated (and the vaccine takes 2 weeks to protect you). The outbreak will be over before that.
That’s the power of exponential growth.
We’re already at 4x our previous high and we’re doubling every 2 weeks.
For the board, NOW would be a really good time to get a booster. Everyone is going to get covid, even if they have been vaccinated, even if they’ve previously had covid.Report
“in Red states where politicians have jumped on the antivax train, we may reasonably expect to see higher rates of infection, transmission, hospitalization, and ultimately death…”
yeah…no
For death rates by state, so far it’s a toss-up, with two of the top five voting Blue in 2020. So yeah, weasel-words “reasonably expect to see higher” is maybe valid, but it’s not like red state FREEDUMB ADDIX have all their citizens choking to death on their own puke while smart intelligent science-following blue state governments following safe and sane policies are coming through just fine.Report
Top 4 states for covid hospitalizations – Louisiana, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi. Note that while Louisiana has a democratic governor, he’s being regularly opposed by a Republican legislature.Report
Sorry, I’m still back in 2020 where deaths were the most important statistic.Report
Even then, hospitalizations and case rate were important.Report
The big thing that’s changed since 2020 is that Republicans weren’t gloating over the NYC outbreak. At least, no one I knew. We were worried for other people no matter their party affiliation. We were freaking out at the nursing home policy, not blaming those who got sick.
This is something that Jaybird pointed out that I’ve really noticed in the omicron era. Now that liberals are getting the disease, they’re writing articles about how infection doesn’t make you a bad person. How utterly messed up must people have been, how smug and hate-filled, if that’s their reaction?Report
You and I know very different Republicans. Because a great many were gloating about the outbreaks because they saw it as as yet another way to own the libs.
Those who remain unvaccinated, get COVID, and are now, again, clogging up the medical system begging for treatment are not bad people. They are making bad choices based on lies. Just as Republican politicians leading their states are making bad choices based on lies. That has been the case since the beginning.,Report
I remember the discussions on this site. No one was writing the kind of messages that you or Saul now post. As for your second paragraph, you missed the point; the left has been treating covid victims as inferior people from about the moment NYC got under control until the moment that they themselves started getting covid. The outdoor double-masked insulting the outdoor non-masked. The constant judgment. There’s a story that Democrats tell themselves that Republicans have no empathy, and don’t believe something is a problem until it happens to someone they know. The past month has documented which side that really applies to.Report
Who from the left carried rifles into a state house in protest of lockdowns and mask mandates? Who from the left is making death threats against public health officials? which politicians form the left are running websites to raise campaign donations calling for the firing of long serving public health leaders? Who from the left is going around screaming at underpaid waiters and baristas who politely try to enforce mask requirements in private businesses? Who from the allegedly left leaning Mainstream media is lying regularly about their own vaccine status to their viewers while peddling quack cures and denigrating vaccine developed by the last president? I could on and on.
You want us to have empathy for people who, nearly two years on, continue to voluntarily dismiss the actual science, to make – as you put it – the unethical choice to remain unvaccinated while demanding they be cured by an increasingly overburdened healthcare system? You want us to turn a blind eye to the enormous amount of needless death and suffering they have caused in the whimsical and naïve name of some alleged freedom? You want us not to judge?
That’s rich. And sorry, no. We will judge, Just as the right judges us. Remember – to a vast many IRL Republicans and conservatives I’m at best and idiot and at worst a traitor for being an open and proud liberal. Marjorie Taylor Green – who is very popular in her very red Congressional district – wants people like me hunted and driven out of government (if not outright harmed) when Republicans take power. As long as that remains in play conservatives don’t get to preach about the unfairness of being called out for their behavior.Report
There’s no profit in talking to Pinky about who or what he knows or heard of who said or did what.Report
I don’t think so. IMHO they are making bad choices, then they look for lies to back up their “reasoning”.
That’s one of the things about “reasoning”. For many people/issues it’s less of a tool to make a good choice and more of a tool for justifying the choice they’ve already made.Report
Interesting. Forcing people to be vaccinated is less effective than we’d like to think? Gov has less control than we’d like to think? Or maybe it’s politicians virtue signaling is less effective.Report
My totally unscientific observation is that vaccination generally is most effective when mandated for children to enter school. No toddler-kindergarten kid is fighting it themselves and historically it was only a strange subset of parents undertaking that battle and accepting the consequences.
You look at other traditionally optional vaccines primarily taken by adults like flu and rates are all over the place. Obviously rates are high among the elderly, and in professions like healthcare that mandate it for obvious reasons, but is much lower among younger people and people who don’t work white collar jobs that host an annual flu shot drive.Report
“historically it was only a strange subset of parents…”
This is no longer true.
And won’t revert back anytime soon, or when the next deadly public health crisis occurs.Report
“Revert”? Far as I can tell we’ve gone through this every time a new vacation is released.
The anti-cervix cancer vaccination is a good example. There are lots of others and the issue goes back for as long as this technology has been around.
What’s new is everyone who is vaccination shy is going to get infected at the same time (to be fair so will everyone who has had the vaccination).Report
And what’s not actually new is the unvaccinated will be sicker and more likely to die.Report
No we don’t.
For every new vaccination, beginning with smallpox and continuing through polio, measles and HPV there has been a small subset of anti-vax holdouts.
What’s different now is their numbers have exploded, fueled by a massive propaganda war waged by Fox News and the Republicans.
The anti-vaxxers are here to stay and they won’t go back to being a fringe group within our lifetimes.
ETA: And this won’t change with the next deadly pandemic no matter what it is.
This SCOTUS case doesn’t say “This only applies to the omicron variant of the Covid-19 virus”. The hydrocloriquine injectors, pee-drinkers, and snake oil handlers aren’t going to disappear.Report
HPV coverage is currently 75%.
Covid coverage (at least one dose) is currently 75%
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7035a1.htm
There are other vaccinations which have higher coverage, but that’s with the school system forcing it on small children before they can make a choice.
Or lets look at other countries without the evil GOP.
Germany has 75% coverage.
France has 79%.
UK 78%.
Sweden 76%
Finland 79%.
The math strongly says the GOP didn’t create this problem and (amazingly) probably hasn’t made it worse. Everyone in the world knows about the vaccine. With perfect knowledge and perfect access, 20-25% choose not to vaccinate.
This post requires a second link for world wide rates but I’ll post it on a reply to myself.Report
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccinations-tracker.htmlReport
The fully vaccinated rate in the US is only 62.8%. Germany is 71.82%. The UK is 70.09%. France is 74.87%. Finland in 75.09%. And Sweden is 73.38%. Which means that in fact the US is doing worse then other nations. And there is likely a political/tribal identity component to that.
The other problem I see with your analysis is the countries you chose are relatively small and relatively culturally homogeneous. In the US, full vaccination rates by state vary from 78.4% in Vermont down to 48.1% in Wyoming. Here in Mississippi its 48.8%. And with the notable exceptions of very purple Maryland and Virginia, the leading vaccine states are helmed by Democrats. Republicans are not blameless, and the states that are helmed by them are doing relatively worse, which keeps the US from being a leader in vaccinations.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/coronavirus-covid-19/vaccine-trackerReport
You’re assuming that the GOP leaders are able to order their followers to believe what they want to believe.
I’d say the reality is more they’re spineless and unable to resist what their followers want.
Absolutely there are cultural aspects to this. But there’s also a blaming the weather man for the weather aspect to this as well.
Our leaders are supposed to flinch away from things the people don’t want. That’s a feature, not a flaw. It works against us here and now but this too will pass.Report
Republicans ALSO screamed about the HPV vaccinations.
But even comparing vaccination rates of HPV and Covid is an error.
There has never been a deliberate campaign against any other vaccination that compares to the Fox/ Republican campaign of lies and misinformation, in size and scope and effectiveness.
This is radically new in American history and it won’t pass within our lifetimes.
In ten years, Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan and all the others will still be media figures, still reaching millions of people , still spewing whatever nonsense they happen to find pleasing at the moment.
DeSantis and Abbot may be retired, but will surely be replaced with some other mouth breather who is essentially the same.
Speaker of the House Boebert and Senate Majority Leader Dr. Oz will be doing things that only a crazy person would have said back in 2022.Report
Lifetimes? It will be done this year.
Covid will burn out in a few months. There will be no reason to force vaccination on adults so we won’t.
The issue will go away.
This vaccination will be added to the list of what is required for elementary school.
Given how it was a century since the last pandemic and the increase is technologies; We either won’t see this again in our lifetimes and/or we’ll have better technology before we do.Report
There will be no reason to vaccinate against measles, mumps, rubella, polio, smallpox?
Is there some natural law that forbids viruses from occurring more than once a century?
Were you asleep during the last three or four viral epidemics that were averted only due to the swift international action of quarantine and vaccination?Report
Just for the record, no one vaccinates against smallpox any more.Report
Ignoring smallpox, none of these are controversial.
New things are scary to adults because they’re new. Tried and true solutions are best. This is the very definition of “conservative”.
Those vaccinations are tried and true.
We’re not hearing “all vaccinations are bad” we’re hearing “this one is different”. Thus “religious” objections from people who have never had a problem with other vaccinations and still don’t.Report
You’re making this comment on a thread where literally, the SCOTUS reasoning applies to ALL vaccine mandates by OSHA, whether by Covid or any other health emergency.
Two Republican states have banned employer vaccine mandates for ANY vaccine.
Ten states have banned state worker vaccine mandates.
Six have banned vaccine mandates for health workers.
Twenty states have banned proof of vaccination requirements.
I know, you want to argue that this only applies to Covid, and as soon as another health emergency happens, well, by cracky Republicans will just cheerfully embrace vaccine mandates and masks and all manner of public health measures.
But that’s whats called “saying the quiet parts loud”.
The Republican leadership suddenly adopted an anti-vax posture because it happened to be convenient for them politically.
But they couldn’t say that out loud because well, that would make them look craven and stupid, right?
So, as with this SCOTUS case, they had to invent all sorts of bizarre illogic to puff it up into sounding like a principled stance.
But the whole idea of a “principled stance” is that it applies generally, not just to this one thing that happens to be politically convenient at the moment.
I know they are full of crap, and YOU know they are full of crap, but the true believers who drink their own urine and inject horse dewormer don’t, and they vote Republican and they run the party now.Report
OSHA isn’t supposed to be dealing with “health emergencies”. That’s not it’s mandate. My expectation is the number of other “vaccine mandates” is zero, maybe excluding hospitals.
The number of “employer vaccine mandates” I’ve run into thus far is zero. My employer offers them, I accept, but there’s a strong argument that the gov is over reaching here.
We have actual public health organizations and arms of government. I think the States have the authority the gov is trying for here but whatever.
The BIG place where vaccines are mandated is for children in school, and far as I can tell that will continue.
The gov has a LONG tradition of abusing any power it has it’s hands on, and giving it the power of forcing cultural cramdowns via employment seems like a issue.Report
If this is true, Sinema is at Norma Desmond levels of delusion: https://twitter.com/Amy_Siskind/status/1481731676669632516?s=20Report
Fun factoid. Norma Desmond was 50 in the movie.Report
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, unless you’re acting twenty.Report
“I am big! It’s the viruses that got small.”Report
That’s some crazy stuff. Republicans won’t vote for her, even if she runs on the R ticket, and Democrats won’t vote for her.
She’ll flop worse than any “The public is dying for a candidate to raise taxes on the working class, cut them on the rich, and slash social spending” candidate out of the Third Way school.
Bubbles are real but dang, that bubble has to be made out of adamantium.Report
Thank you to all of our excellent commentariat for their smart and informed discussion, relieving me of feeling compelled to draft an explainer.Report
The Supreme Court may have bailed out the Democrats. Mandates (vax or test) in my state were targeted and required compliance by Oct. 4th for those employed in government, schools and health care providers. There have been numerous extensions (individual and by class) with the hospitals here needing an additional five months for compliance. An OSHA emergency rule can only remain in place for six months. Hospitals have several advantages in administering a vaccine mandate, most having started early in encouraging vaccination, having their own testing and vaccination capacity, and having had and enforced flu vaccine mandates for years.
Mandates later needed legislation to implement that was difficult to obtain even with a supermajority Democratic legislature. Lawsuits sprang up, including from public service unions, based upon an interpretation of a healthcare freedom of conscious law that would have eviscerated the mandates. Initially there were not enough votes for an immediate effective date (as opposed to June) due to opposition from the black caucus. In addition, employers needed liability protection if they were to enforce vaccine mandates — the fear being that they would rubberstamp any medical / religious exemption otherwise. Again, the necessary votes were not there until language was removed expressly contemplating that employment could be terminated. There are legislators that support mandates, but not consequences.
Six months is probably not enough time to effectively implement this type of rule and the results would have been chaotic and arbitrary enforcement. I think people greatly undervalue how policies may have some degree of general support which evaporates in its implementation.Report
Good news!
Report
It looks like that applies only to hospital reporting to HHS, not to state/local reporting to CDC, which is the origin of most of the data we all follow.Report
“A judge in Texas ruled on Friday that President Joe Biden could not require federal employees to be vaccinated against the coronavirus and blocked the U.S. government from disciplining employees who failed to comply.”
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-judge-blocks-biden-federal-employee-covid-19-vaccine-mandate-2022-01-21/
Now things get interesting.Report
That horse is out of the gate, down the pasture, and over the next hill –
The small number unvaccinated are unfortunate, but collectively we are WAY ahead of general US statistics.
https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-11-24/biden-administration-92-of-federal-workers-vaccinated-against-covid-19Report
Best view i have ever seen !Report