A federal appeals court ruled to uphold its stay on President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for companies with 100 or more employees.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit released a 22-page ruling on Friday reaffirmed its block of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration taking action on the mandate “pending adequate judicial review” the petitioners’ motion for a permanent injunction.
“The Mandate is a one-size-fits-all sledgehammer that makes hardly any attempt to account for differences in workplaces (and workers) that have more than a little bearing on workers’ varying degrees of susceptibility to the supposedly ‘grave danger’ the Mandate purports to address,” the ruling said.
JOHNSON & JOHNSON ANNOUNCES IT WILL SPLIT IN TWO
The stay on the COVID-19 vaccine mandate drew praise from multiple Republicans on social media.
“WE WON! Litigation will continue, but this is a massive victory for Texas & FREEDOM from Biden’s tyranny & lawlessness,” tweeted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is party to the lawsuit along with other states.
The Biden administration announced on Nov. 4 it was setting a deadline of Jan. 4 for companies with more than 100 employees to start requiring vaccination against COVID-19 or enforce weekly testing.
The mandate was temporarily halted by the New Orleans-based appeals three-judge panel on Nov. 6, saying petitioners offered significant cause to believe there are “grave statutory and constitutional issues” with the federal order.
Lawyers for the Labor Department and Justice Department filed a response on Monday, arguing that halting the mandate would prolong the pandemic and “cost dozens or even hundreds of lives per day,” according to the Associated Press.
White House deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the Biden administration is confident the mandate will hold legal weight in court.
“We are very confident that it can,” Jean-Pierre said at a press briefing last week. “As for the legal side of this, let me be crystal clear to avoid what appears to be possible misinformation or disinformation around the emergency temporary standard being a vaccine mandate. That would be, on its face, incorrect as has been explicit for months. It is a standard for a safe workplace to either comply with weekly testing or to be vaccinated.”
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President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandates for large businesses, as well as those for federal employees and contractors, have drawn the ire of Republican governors and politicians, who have taken the administration to court on multiple fronts.
