In what could be a serious blow to the Biden Administration's vaccine mandate for companies with a hundred or more employees, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans reaffirmed their stance in support of a hold on the mandate.
Despite filings by the Administration saying the pause would cost “dozens or even hundreds of lives per day”, the court said they were unmoved.
“Health agencies do not make housing policy, and occupational safety administrations do not make health policy,” the latest ruling states. “In seeking to do so here, OSHA runs afoul of the statute from which it draws its power and, likely, violates the constitutional structure that safeguards our collective liberty.”
Court of Appeal justices call the mandate a broad and sweeping action which does not take into account the diversity of the workplaces across the nation.
In their opinion the justices write: “Rather than a delicately handled scalpel, 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 response is not the final ruling on the mandate, but continues its pause of enforcement until challenges are heard in court and a final ruling is rendered.