6th Circuit Court of Appeals Reinstates Biden Vaccine Policy For Large Employers

The Washington Post reports, Appeals court reinstates Biden’s vaccine policy for businesses, setting up a likely showdown at Supreme Court:

A federal appeals court on Friday reinstated the Biden administration’s coronavirus vaccination policy for large private businesses, reversing an earlier court ruling that had halted one of the White House’s signature efforts to reduce transmissions and drive down case counts.

The decision, by a split three-judge panel of the Ohio-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit was quickly appealed to the [radical Republican] U.S. Supreme Court, which is likely to have the final say over the rules set to take effect Jan. 4.

The Justice Department had asked the court to clear the way for the policy designed to protect workers at large private businesses from the virus that has killed more than 800,000 people in the United States.

Under the Labor Department rules, employers with more than 100 workers must require staff to get vaccinated or face weekly testing and mandatory masking. There are exceptions for employees who do not work on-site or with others.

Friday’s 2-1 ruling backs the Biden administration’s authority to issue the emergency workplace directive through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

“The record establishes that COVID-19 has continued to spread, mutate, kill, and block the safe return of American workers to their jobs. To protect workers, OSHA can and must be able to respond to dangers as they evolve,” according to the opinion written by Judge Jane B. Stranch.

More than two dozen Republican-led states, private businesses and conservative legal groups challenged the policy [i.e., the Trump Death Cult.] Before the legal challenges filed in courts throughout the country were consolidated at the 6th Circuit, a different appeals court temporarily halted Biden’s plans.

The [radical Republican] Louisiana-based 5th Circuit Court of Appeals said the Labor Department exceeded its authority and ordered OSHA to not take any further steps to implement or enforce the rules.

OSHA invoked a rarely used power to issue the policy, which is expected to cover 84 million workers. The Biden administration estimates the rules would save thousands of lives and keep people out of inundated hospitals.

In a statement Friday, the Justice Department said it was pleased that the 6th Circuit is “allowing OSHA to implement common-sense, science-based measures to keep workers safe and healthy during a deadly pandemic.”

[T]he majority of the 6th Circuit panel said the cost of delaying the vaccination policy is potentially high and would harm the public interest.

The directive, they said, “is an important step in curtailing the transmission of a deadly virus that has killed over 800,000 people in the United States, brought our healthcare system to its knees, forced businesses to shut down for months on end, and cost hundreds of thousands of workers their jobs,” wrote Stranch, a nominee of President Barack Obama. She was joined by Judge Julia Smith Gibbons, a nominee of President George W. Bush.

The dissenting judge, Joan Larsen, said OSHA had exceeded its authority to regulate employers’ conduct and should have considered less sweeping alternatives.

“The virus that causes COVID-19 is not, of course, uniquely a workplace condition. Its potency lies in the fact that it exists everywhere an infected person may be — home, school, or grocery store, to name a few,” wrote Larsen, a nominee of President Donald Trump [and a member of the Trump Death Cult?] “So how can OSHA regulate an employee’s exposure to it?”

After the ruling Friday night, lawyers for the challengers quickly asked the Supreme Court to temporarily block the vaccination policy once again.

Separately, the Biden administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to allow it to fully enforce a nationwide requirement that health-care workers be vaccinated if they work at facilities participating in Medicare and Medicaid. Lower courts have suspended the policy after 24 states filed lawsuits. On Friday, the Supreme Court told challenging states to respond to the administration’s petition by Dec. 30, which would not leave the court much time for a decision.

Earlier this week: Supreme Court Allows Vaccine Mandate for New York Health Care Workers:

The Supreme Court on Monday refused to block New York’s requirement that health care workers be vaccinated against the coronavirus even when they cite religious objections.

As is often the court’s practice in rulings on emergency applications, its unsigned order included no reasoning. But [the radical Republican] Justice Neil M. Gorsuch filed a 14-page dissent saying that the majority had betrayed the court’s commitment to religious liberty.

[Radical Republican] Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined Justice Gorsuch’s dissent. [The most radical Republican] Justice Clarence Thomas also said he would have blocked the vaccine requirement, but he gave no reasons.

And what was Gorsuch’s reasoning? Unbelievably, more anti-abortion religious extremism:

“These applicants are not ‘anti-vaxxers’ who object to all vaccines,” Justice Gorsuch added. “Instead, the applicants explain, they cannot receive a Covid-19 vaccine because their religion teaches them to oppose abortion in any form, and because each of the currently available vaccines has depended upon abortion-derived fetal cell lines in its production or testing.”

“The Free Exercise Clause protects not only the right to hold unpopular religious beliefs inwardly and secretly,” he wrote. “It protects the right to live out those beliefs publicly.”

The Constitution is not a suicide pact. Religious zealots and their anti-abortion extremism cannot be allowed to constitute a public health menace to the larger population because they will not get vaccinated against a deadly disease. You asked, we answered: Do the COVID-19 vaccines contain aborted fetal cells?:

Question 

Do the COVID-19 vaccines contain aborted fetal cells? 

Answer from infectious disease expert and practicing Catholic James Lawler, MD 

No, the COVID-19 vaccines do not contain any aborted fetal cells. However, fetal cell lines – cells grown in a laboratory based on aborted fetal cells collected generations ago – were used in testing during research and development of the mRNA vaccines, and during production of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

It is true that decades ago, scientists decided to use fetal tissue to start the cell lines we use to test drugs today. However, the description of ongoing modern fetal tissue harvesting to create vaccines is dishonest sensationalism.  

As a practicing Catholic, I think the moral balance of indirectly benefitting from an abortion that occurred 50 years ago in order to take a vaccine that will prevent further death in the community is a no-brainer – especially considering that so many of the over 620,000 American deaths have occurred in the most vulnerable and marginalized in our society. We need to focus on saving lives right now. We need to care for our neighbors. 

The Vatican and bishops agree. The Vatican has issued clear guidance that permits Roman Catholics in good faith to receive COVID-19 vaccines that use fetal cell lines in development or production. Read the Vatican’s comments on the morality of receiving a COVID-19 vaccine. 

So the radical Republican Justices on the Supreme Court, all of them Catholic, should take their direction from the Vatican and Catholic doctors who are trying to save lives from Covid. These anti-abortion religious zealots are not “pro-life” if they are perfectly OK with putting other people’s lives at risk with Covid because they refuse to get vaccinated.

The Supreme Court in October refused to provide relief to health care workers in Maine who had made an essentially identical request in a challenge to a similar state requirement, over the dissents of the same three justices.

The court has also rejected challenges to vaccination requirements at Indiana University, for personnel in New York City’s school system and for workers at a Massachusetts hospital. The court also rejected a challenge to a federal mandate requiring masks for air travel.

Those rulings were all issued by only one justice, which can be a sign that the legal questions involved were not considered substantial. But those rulings did not involve religion.

On Capitol Hill, [Trump Death Cult] Senate Republicans pushed through a recent proposal that aims to repeal the vaccine or testing requirements for private companies, saying the rules are unconstitutional and put jobs at risk. Two Democrats, Sens. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) and Jon Tester (Mont.), joined their GOP colleagues in passing the measure, which is expected to face resistance in the House.

The New York Times adds, Appeals Court Reinstates OSHA’s Vaccine Mandate for Workers at Larger Businesses:

The White House welcomed the decision.

“The OSHA vaccination or testing rule will ensure businesses enact measures that will protect their employees,” Kevin Munoz, a White House spokesman, said in a statement. “Especially as the U.S. faces the highly transmissible Omicron variant, it’s critical we move forward with vaccination requirements and protections for workers with the urgency needed in this moment.”

[T]he rule for large employers, which OSHA issued last month, forces such companies to require vaccinations by Jan. 4 and to require unvaccinated employees to wear masks indoors.

Employers also are allowed to give their workers the option to be tested weekly instead of getting the vaccine, though they are not required to do so unless the worker has an exemption for medical or religious reasons. The rule makes an exception for employees who do not come into close contact with other people at their jobs, such as those who work at home or exclusively outdoors.

The administration estimated that 22 million people would get vaccinated and that 250,000 hospitalizations would be prevented because of the rule, which applies to more than 84 million workers.

Under a 1970 law, OSHA has the authority to pass a so-called emergency temporary standard, imposing new rules for workplace safety, provided it can show that workers are exposed to a “grave danger” and that the rule is necessary.

[In] dissolving the Fifth Circuit’s stay on Friday, the majority of the Sixth Circuit panel said that the agency had sufficiently demonstrated that measures against the coronavirus pandemic meet the standard laid out by Congress in the 1970 law that created the agency.

“OSHA has demonstrated the pervasive danger that Covid-19 poses to workers — unvaccinated workers in particular — in their workplaces,” Judge Stranch wrote, adding that the possibility of new variants cited by the agency when it issued the rule “has borne out with the Omicron variant.”

The majority opinion also rejected a constitutional challenge to the rule.

Judge Stranch, an Obama appointee, was joined by Judge Julia Smith Gibbons, who was appointed by President George W. Bush. In a brief concurring opinion, Judge Gibbons signaled that as a matter of judicial restraint the courts should defer to OSHA’s expertise.

“Reasonable minds may disagree on OSHA’s approach to the pandemic, but we do not substitute our judgment for that of OSHA, which has been tasked by Congress with policymaking responsibilities,” she wrote, adding: “Beyond constitutional limitations, the work of an agency, often scientific and technical in nature, is outside our expertise.”

But Judge Joan L. Larsen, a Trump appointee, dissented, arguing — as had the Fifth Circuit panel before her — that the agency had exceeded its legal authority.

“The mandate is aimed directly at protecting the unvaccinated from their own choices,” Judge Larsen wrote. “Vaccines are freely available, and unvaccinated people may choose to protect themselves at any time. And because the secretary likely lacks congressional authority to force them to protect themselves, the remaining stay factors cannot tip the balance.”

Hey dumbass: Their decision also affects everyone with whom they come in contact. They do not live in their own isolation bubble. This mandate is about protecting the lives of others, and the public at large, you know, social responsibility. The nihilism of these Trump Death Cult members is obscene.

The OSHA rule, alongside a separate requirement for federal contractors, has helped drive a number of large companies to announce a form of vaccine mandate, including Procter & Gamble, IBM and American Airlines. Others, like Tyson Foods and Google, introduced mandates on their own, in the face of the rising risk of the Delta variant.

A recent poll of 543 companies by the consulting firm Willis Towers Watson found that 57 percent of firms either required or planned to require Covid-19 vaccinations. That included 32 percent that planned to mandate vaccines only if the OSHA rule takes effect. Seven percent said they planned to carry it out regardless of the outcome.

But while some companies welcomed the OSHA requirement as a cover to move forward, others have resisted, citing concerns about exacerbating an already-challenging labor shortage. Some of the largest private employers, including Walmart and JPMorgan Chase, have yet to outline a broad mandate for all employees.

The Biden administration’s rule requiring vaccinations for federal contractors and their employees remains held up in litigation, and a number of employers, including Boeing, Amtrak, General Electric and Union Pacific, have suspended their vaccine requirements – pending a final determination in this litigation.