Federal appeals court reaffirms its decision to freeze Biden’s vaccine mandate
In a blistering 22-page opinion, the Fifth US Circuit Court of Appeals said that the vaccine mandate issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is “fatally flawed” and both “overinclusive” and “underinclusive.”
“Indeed, the Mandate’s strained prescriptions combine to make it the rare government pronouncement that is both overinclusive (applying to employers and employees in virtually all industries and workplaces in America, with little attempt to account for the obvious differences between the risks facing, say, a security guard on a lonely night shift, and a meatpacker working shoulder to shoulder in a cramped warehouse) and underinclusive (purporting to save employees with 99 or more coworkers from a ‘grave danger’ in the workplace, while making no attempt to shield employees with 98 or fewer coworkers from the very same threat),” the court wrote.
OSHA, which falls under the US Labor Department, earlier this month unveiled the vaccine rules that were set to take effect January 4.
The mandate has come under challenge from Republican-led states and some private employers, who say OSHA overstepped its authority in issuing such a rule, but also from labor unions, who argue in some instances that the mandate doesn’t go far enough to protect workers.
On Tuesday, the DC-based Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation will conduct the multicircuit lottery. The names of the circuit courts where there are currently legal challenges to the mandate will literally be placed in a raffle drum, and an official will pull out the name of a circuit court, where all the cases will then be transferred.
