Symbolic Vote For The Stupid: Senate Votes Against Employer Vaccine Mandates That Are Working

The pro-Covid, anti-science, anti-vaxxer, anti-socially responsible Republicans in the Senate got their symbolic vote against President Biden’s employer vaccine “mandate” (not actually a mandate because employees can opt for weekly Covid testing, and there are exemptions available to qualified employees) on Wednesday night.

Republicans did this as US Covid cases surge as vaccine progress slows and Omicron variant sparks fears. And they got two Democratic senators to go along with their reckless irresponsibility: the usual suspect, Joe Manchin, and somewhat surprisingly, Jon Tester (whom I have always liked and respected). I guess Tester viewed this symbolic vote as a throw away safety vote, since it is likely DOA in the House, and President Biden will veto it. Still, I am disappointed in him.

The Hill reports, Senate votes to nix Biden’s vaccine mandate for businesses:

The Senate on Wednesday voted to nix President Biden’s vaccine “mandate” for larger businesses, handing Republicans a symbolic win.

Senators voted 52-48 on the resolution, which needed a simple majority to be approved. Democratic Sens. Jon Tester (Mont.) and Joe Manchin (W.Va.) voted with Republicans, giving it enough support to be sent to the House.

The resolution faces an uphill path in the House, where Republicans aren’t able to use a similar fast-track process to force a vote over the objections of Democratic leadership. Instead, Republicans are hoping to get the simple majority needed to force a vote through a discharge petition, which will require support from a handful of House Democrats.

But Republicans view Wednesday’s Senate vote as a significant win, and it’s the first time they’ve been able to use the Congressional Review Act to successfully get a resolution targeting a Biden rule through the Senate.

The rule, published through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), orders businesses with at least 100 employees to require that their workers to get vaccinated or undergo regular testing by Jan. 4.

But Republicans believe that it constitutes federal government overreach and violates American workers’ civil liberties.

WRONG! The U.S. Has A Long Precedent For Vaccine Mandates: “[T]he Supreme Court in 1905 in a very famous case called Jacobson v. Massachusetts upheld a Cambridge City law, which required smallpox vaccination. That was something where the Supreme Court said that we don’t have a right to place other people at risk. And by 1922, in another case, Justice Brandeis, writing for unanimous court, upheld childhood school mandates, calling it settled law.

What Republicans really object to is that this is about social responsibility to your fellow citizens (the common good), and they want the individual freedom to be indifferent to the health and welfare of their fellow citizens and to act like a raging asshole 24 hours a day. They are the one’s threatening, and spitting on, and beating up retail store clerks simply for being asked to wear a mask while shopping.

I fully agree with Charles Blow’s op-ed today, I’m Furious at the Unvaccinated:

I am disappointed, and I am angry, not just with my friend but with all the people who are choosing not to get vaccinated.

There was a point, earlier on in the pandemic, when vaccines were still scarce, when I tried to be tolerant with the holdouts, tried not to shame them, tried not to be angry with them, tried to allow them time to educate themselves about the benefits of getting vaccinated.

But that time has long since passed for me. Call me one of the intolerant. That’s what I am. I will not coddle willful ignorance anymore. I will not indulge the fool’s errand of “I’m still doing my own research” anymore, either.

This virus has already killed nearly 800,000 Americans and infected nearly 50 million. We are now averaging about 120,000 new cases a day.

This virus is deadly and unrelenting. The only way out of this situation, for our country and the world, is through the vaccines. We must dramatically shrink the number of people vulnerable to the virus — or else we risk allowing our population to act as a petri dish for the growth of variants.

Michael Saag, a professor of medicine and infectious diseases expert at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, told The Guardian: “Unvaccinated people are basically the cannon fodder of the virus. The virus needs people to infect in order to replicate and the more people it has that are vulnerable or susceptible to infection, the more likely it will mutate.”

The unvaccinated don’t only leave themselves vulnerable to the virus, they make everyone more vulnerable.

I have heard all the reasons for resistance. There are the people who have politicized the virus and see getting vaccinated through a partisan lens. There are the people who view government pressure, and especially mandates, to put something in your body as overreach and anathema to the American ideal of independence and freedom. There are people who don’t trust the government, sometimes with good reason.

I have heard it all. And I reject it all.

There are just too many fresh graves pocking the land to entertain these objections. And too many lives disrupted, as people grieve lost loved ones, alter their employment, and keep their children home from school.

[E]ven if eradication [of the virus] is all but impossible, it is possible to control the virus and mitigate its spread, if more people are vaccinated.

So yes, I am furious at the unvaccinated, and I am not ashamed of disclosing that. I am no longer trying to understand them or educate them. Barriers to access have fallen. The only reason for remaining unvaccinated that I now accept is from people who have medical conditions that prevent it.

All others have a choice to either be part of the solution or part of the problem. The unvaccinated are choosing to be part of the problem.

This is now a Pandemic of The Unvaccinated, and the GQP Trump Death Cult wants people to die unnecessarily – entirely preventable with vaccinations –  because “Freedom!” to be a raging asshole 24 hours a day. This is criminal negligence, not individual freedom. They have hundreds of thousands of lost lives on their hands. They are responsible for unnecessary suffering and deaths. They are social pariahs.

Phew! That felt good. It needed to be said.

Back to The Hill:

Sen. Mike Braun (Ind.)[image above], who spearheaded the GOP resolution, said that Americans should get vaccinated “unless they have a good reason” but called the vaccine requirement an “ultimatum” that has “mainstream America scared.” 

“That is the heavy hand of government, that is overreach and that is my phone started ringing off the hook,” he said.

What he really means is anti-government Republicans, the armed insurrectionists who took over state capitol buildings in the Spring of 2020 over Covid safety protocols, and then tried to overthrow American democracy  in a failed coup d’etat on January 6 by MAGA/QAnon seditious insurrectionists. “Mainstream America” is Vaccinated America. More than 200 million people in the U.S. are now fully vaccinated, though deaths and cases are still rising among the unvaccinated:

The United States reached a significant milestone late Wednesday, with more than 200 million people now fully vaccinated against the coronavirus — about 60 percent of the population.

In the past week, an average of 1.92 million doses per day were administered — a 35 percent increase over the week before — according to data from The Washington Post’s tracker.

However, the achievement comes as the nation’s tallies of daily deaths and new cases rose in the past week and hospitalization rates jumped by 10 percent. The looming threat of the newly identified omicron variant of the coronavirus also hangs over the country as it enters the holiday season.

Manchin and Tester both voted for the GOP resolution on Wednesday after they joined all other Democrats last week in voting against defunding the mandate as part of the short-term funding bill.

Manchin argued in a statement that the federal government “should incentivize, not penalize, private employers whose responsibility it is to protect their employees from COVID-19.”

Tester added this week that he’s not “crazy about mandates.” [That’s not much of a rationale for his vote.]

Biden’s vaccine mandate for larger businesses has run into several court challenges.

In November, the New Orleans-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit [a radical Republican court] temporarily blocked, or stayed, the rule, calling it “fatally flawed” and ordering that OSHA not enforce the requirement “pending adequate judicial review” of a motion for a permanent injunction.

Note: Two of the three judges blocking Biden’s vaccine rules were appointed by Trump, a sign of how thoroughly he reshaped the judiciary. The other was appointed by Ronald Reagan.

The Biden administration moved late last month to try to restart the requirement, arguing that “delaying this standard would endanger many thousands of people and would likely cost many lives per day.”

“With the reopening of workplaces and the emergence of the highly transmissible Delta variant, the threat to workers is ongoing and overwhelming,” a government lawyer added.

[A] Wall Street Journal poll released Tuesday showed that 50 percent of voters say they favor Biden’s vaccine requirements for employers with 100 or more workers, while 47 percent oppose the president’s mandate.

Even if the GOP resolution gets a vote in the House, the White House has warned that Biden will veto it. Neither chamber has the two-thirds majority required to override a veto.

“We certainly hope the Senate, Congress, will stand up to the anti-vaccine and -testing crowd, and we’re going to continue to work to implement these. If it comes to the president’s desk, he will veto it,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters. 

“We’ve got a new variant, and cases are rising. President’s been clear. We’ll use every tool to protect the American people, and we hope others will join us in that effort,” she added.

Democrats blasted the GOP resolution ahead of Wednesday’s vote, noting it came amid concerns about the new omicron COVID-19 variant.

“The worst thing we can do is to tie our own hands behind our backs and let these new variants spread and grow and new ones after omicron and so many others. But that is what Republican-pushed, anti-vaccines would do,” said Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.).

“I will strongly vote against this measure, with strong feelings about what’s good for this country and about fighting anti-science and theories that seem to, as I said, come from the same place that the flat Earth theory came from, that the theory that the sun revolves around the Earth came from,” he added. “We ought not give it a stamp of approval in this chamber.”

More importantly, COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates Are Working, Public Health Experts Say:

While COVID-19 vaccine mandates have sparked lawsuits and protests, the data shows that they’re working and increasing vaccination rates.

Some organizations have reported vaccination rates that jumped from less than 50% to more than 90%, according to ABC News. Workplace mandates have especially encouraged employees who were on the fence to get a shot.

“In general, vaccine mandates work,” James Colgrove, a public health professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, told ABC News.

For decades, the U.S. has monitored the effectiveness of vaccine mandates in schools, he noted, which have successfully required shots against measles, mumps, and other illnesses that used to be widespread. Certain employees, such as hospital workers, must take vaccines for their jobs, he said, and those requirements have also been effective over the years.

“The more normalized it becomes, the more people [know] someone else who is vaccinated, the more people will comply,” he said. “With any vaccine, the longer it’s been around, the more people get with it.”

[V]accine mandates appear to be working in the public sector as well. State health department officials in Washington told ABC News that the percentage of public employees who were vaccinated jumped from 49% in September to 96% by the vaccine mandate deadline in October.

[O]verall, vaccine mandates tend to reach groups who aren’t completely against the vaccine, medical experts told the news outlet. A small percentage of the population truly opposes the shot, and in most cases, unvaccinated people are on the fence or haven’t seen good enough messaging for it.

“When you look at vaccine resistance, the people who are the most opposed often make a very large amount of noise that is at odds with the actual numbers who are against vaccination,” Colgrove said.