US court freezes Biden’s imposing of vaccine mandate on companies
A US federal appeals court has issued a ruling to freeze a vaccine mandate issued by President Joe Biden, which required employees of certain companies to get vaccinated before Jan. 4.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit cited "grave statutory and constitutional" issues with the ruling for American companies with at least 100 employees to undergo the mandate in the administration’s efforts to tackle the Covid-19.
The federal appeals court’s decision followed lawsuits filed by more than two dozen Republican-controlled states, namely Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Utah.
This is while more than one thousand Americans are dying every day from the coronavirus, most of whom are reportedly unvaccinated.
“Yesterday, I sued the Biden Admin over its unlawful OSHA vax mandate,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a tweet. “WE WON. Just this morning, citing 'grave statutory and constitutional issues,' the 5th Circuit stayed the mandate. The fight is not over and I will never stop resisting this Admin’s unconstitutional overreach!”
The Biden administration was supposed to enforce the ruling via the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) with solicitor of labor Seema Nanda saying in a statement that the Labor Department was "confident in its legal authority" to take such action.
"The Occupational Safety and Health Act explicitly gives OSHA the authority to act quickly in an emergency where the agency finds that workers are subjected to a grave danger and a new standard is necessary to protect them," she said. "We are fully prepared to defend this standard in court.”
Biden’s ruling, meanwhile, faces separate legal challenges by several businesses, advocacy groups, and the so-called “Red” states, where conservatives hold power.
The announcement came amid a deepening rift between Democrats and Republicans over how to handle the pandemic and its repercussions in the United States, which appears to have resulted in the politicization of mandates, masks and vaccines.
Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the conservative-leaning portion of the population have viewed efforts to tackle the virus with skepticism.
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