Biden is trying to disguise the general immunization mandate as a workplace safety measure – Orange County Register

Last week, Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s top infectious disease adviser, said the federal government should consider requiring domestic airliners to be vaccinated against COVID-19. “When you consider immunization as a requirement,” he explains, “it’s another incentive to get more people vaccinated.”

While requiring airline passengers to be vaccinated is clearly intended to make air travel safer, Fauci sees it as a way to increase U.S. vaccination rates. The Biden administration sees the vaccination rule for private employers, ostensibly intended to address workplace hazards, in a similar way.

The contrast between that broader goal and the legal justification for employers’ duties is at the heart of the debate over whether the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has the authority to impose put it or not. That debate comes at the Supreme Court on Friday, when judges will consider whether the mandate should be frozen until challenges to it are resolved.

OSHA’s rule, announced November 5, requires companies with 100 or more employees to require them to be vaccinated or wear masks and undergo weekly virus testing. When Biden announced that policy in September, he presented it as part of the administration’s plan to “immunize the unvaccinated.”

MSNBC curator Stephanie Ruhle calls OSHA’s mandate “the last job for the Federal government to require vaccination.” White House chief of staff Ron Klain retweeted Ruhle’s comment, reinforcing the impression that the regulation was intended to reduce the overall impact of COVID-19 by putting pressure on Americans to get vaccinated.

But OSHA has no such authority. Officially, its rule is that an “emergency interim standard” is “necessary” to protect employees from “serious danger” in the workplace.

That feature, if approved by the courts, allows OSHA to exercise the kind of public health power normally reserved to the states. It also allows the agency to issue regulations with immediate effect without notice, public comment and often required hearings.

The US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which remained ETS a day after it was published, said it “beyond the statutory authority of OSHA.” But after the challenges to the mandate were consolidated and assigned to the U.S. Court of Appeals for 6th Street, a panel of three split judges lifted the 5th Street stay, which is how the case The trial ended in the Supreme Court.

OSHA’s abrupt decision to use its “emergency” powers, nearly two years after the pandemic began and a year after a vaccine became available, doesn’t seem clear-cut. So its preference for vaccinations, unlike other workplace safety measures, is not limited to the workplace. To be clear, OSHA’s estimate of the benefit of this rule is based on vaccine-prevented deaths among working-age Americans, regardless of whether transmission occurs in where.