On Sept. 9, President Joe Biden announced a new mandate that will require the vaccination of millions of Americas. Under his new mandates, Biden announced that federal workers will be required to receive vaccines within 75 days of the mandate’s start or face losing their jobs. Under these guidelines, millions of healthcare workers at hospitals receiving medicare or medicaid funding would also be required to be vaccinated. According to NBC News, Biden also turned his attention to the U.S. Department of Labor, urging them to require businesses with 100 employees or more to receive vaccination or provide a negative test for all unvaccinated employees each week.
“We’ve been patient,” Biden said in his mandate announcement, “but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us.”
CNN reported that a number of Republican state officials have stated their intent to oppose Biden’s new mandates, declaring them unlawful. NBC reports that the White House is expecting to see a number of lawsuits over the mandates, and Arizona has led the charge in opposition from several states, suing Biden and other federal administrations on the grounds that the mandates are “unconstitutional.”
According to CNN, legal experts predict that the legality of the new mandates will depend heavily on how OSHA views their emergency standards for what counts as “grave danger” to workers, and how federal courts view the challenges to the mandates. Lindsey Wiley, director of the Health Law and Policy Program at American University, told CNN, “Arguably, preventing the spread of Covid in workplaces provides the strongest justification for use of an emergency temporary standard that OSHA’s seen in its 50-plus year history.”
When interviewed by CNN, Josh Blackman, a professor at the South Texas College of Law, said that more lawsuits are likely to rise, and eventually, a judge somewhere will side with them. However, the federal mandates may give employers the cover they need to impose their own mandates.
In an article for NBC News, director of the Center for Health and Pharmaceutical Law at Seton Hall University School of Law Jennifer D Olivia stated that Biden’s mandates were legal according to the 1905 Supreme Court decision in the case of Jacobson vs. Massachusetts, when the Board of Health in Cambridge, Massachusetts imposed a $5 fine on anyone who refused vaccination against a smallpox epidemic. In the case, Henning Jacobson, a pastor in Cambridge, challenged the fine under the right to bodily autonomy, and a 7-2 decision rejected Jacobson’s challenge.
