President Biden was warned that he lacked the power to mandate vaccines for private workers, but he ordered the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to do it anyway. Late Friday came a sharp rebuke by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that marks an important check on the runaway administrative state.
“The Mandate’s true purpose is not to enhance workplace safety, but instead to ramp up vaccine uptake by any means necessary,” Judge Kurt Engelhardt wrote for the unanimous panel in a withering opinion that extends the court’s earlier stay on the OSHA mandate, which had been challenged by GOP states, numerous employers and individuals.
With his approval numbers sagging, Mr. Biden in early September ordered OSHA to require private employers with 100 or more workers to mandate that their employees be vaccinated or tested weekly. “Our patience is wearing thin,” he declared. The mandate at the time polled well among most Americans.
After the announcement, White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain retweeted MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle’s tweet that stated, “OSHA doing this vaxx mandate as an emergency workplace safety rule is the ultimate work-around for the Federal govt to require vaccinations.” For “work-around,” read illegal.
…..
This judicial smackdown is so overwhelming that it’s fair to conclude the Administration gave only passing thought to the law. It acted for political reasons, but even that has proven to be a mistake. The White House panicked amid the Afghanistan fiasco and Delta variant breakout, but it missed how resistant millions of people are to government orders regarding their health.
The mandates have increased political polarization, and they are becoming less popular as people see that the vaccines, while effective, do not prevent infection as well as we might have hoped. They are still worth getting, but it ought to be a personal choice. Mr. Biden chose the progressive default of coercion.
Here’s more by Jacob Sullum on Friday’s court ruling against Biden’s abominable vaccine mandate. A slice:
Does COVID-19 pose a “grave danger” in all those settings? “The Mandate itself concedes that the effects of COVID-19 may range from ‘mild’ to ‘critical,'” the court notes. It adds that the threat from COVID-19 depends on transmission trends, which have “varied since the President announced the general parameters of the Mandate in September,” and the vaccination rate among employees. “For the more than seventy-eight percent of Americans aged 12 and older [who are] either fully or partially inoculated against it,” Engelhardt writes, “the virus poses—the Administration assures us—little risk at all.”
In Austria, the straw man is now jailer of the untouchables.
In the Netherlands, the return of the straw man is being protested. A slice:
Nearly 85 per cent of the Dutch adult population is fully vaccinated, but on Thursday the country’s public health institute recorded 16,364 new positive tests in 24 hours – the highest number of any time during the pandemic that has killed more than 18,600 people in the Netherlands.
Caretaker Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte announced the partial lockdown on Friday and said it would run for at least three weeks, saying his government wants to “deliver a hard blow to the virus.”
[DBx: Note that the seven-day average death count from Covid on November 14th was 25, a whopping 0.0001 percent of the population of that country. But we must also take account of the reality that the percentage of Dutch citizens taken away by Covid since SARS-CoV-2 first arrived nearly two years ago is 0.1. Can’t be too safe!]
This study prompted this tweet by Jay Bhattacharya:
Big French study finds most long COVID symptoms (except loss of sense of smell) not associated with prior SARS-CoV-2 infection. There are more pressing health needs for the $1.1 billion that the NIH will spend on long-COVID.
This report in the Times of London prompted this tweet by Freddie Sayers:
This account in @thesundaytimes of life inside ZeroCovid China is chilling.
Let’s hope all those people who were arguing for ZeroCovid for the past year (and have now gone quiet) read it and find it suitably chastening.
From – of all places – the Los Angeles Times:
Vaccines have been quite effective at preventing cases of COVID-19 that lead to severe illness and death, but none has proved reliable at blocking transmission of the virus, [Jefferson] Jones [a medical officer on the CDC’s COVID-19 Epidemiology Task ForceJones] noted.
you cannot comply your way out of tyranny
but you CAN non-comply your way to freedom.
in 2020, governments and bureaucrats shut down the world to bring us into submission.
it is LONG past time we returned the favor.
become ungovernable.
As if we need further evidence that hysterical fear of Covid causes mental derangement, here’s an ad for a “mask for singers.“
