OSHA Suspends Biden Vaccine Mandate For Workers After Court Order
Updated
OSHA.gov is announcing on its website:
On November 12, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit granted a motion to stay OSHA’s COVID-19 Vaccination and Testing Emergency Temporary Standard, published on November 5, 2021 (86 Fed. Reg. 61402) (“ETS”). The court ordered that OSHA “take no steps to implement or enforce” the ETS “until further court order.” While OSHA remains confident in its authority to protect workers in emergencies, OSHA has suspended activities related to the implementation and enforcement of the ETS pending future developments in the litigation.
On November 6, 2021 the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a short preliminary ruling “staying” implementation of the ETS pending further briefing in the court. Shortly after, on November 12, 2021, the Fifth Circuit entered a long opinion in which it has issued a preliminary stay of the law.
In doing so, the court signaled in the strongest of possible terms that it was poised to find that the rule does exceed OSHA‘s statutory authority in several ways and is unconstitutional. You can read the entirety of the opinion here.
The opinion states, “…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 Biden Administration’s OSHA-directed vaccine mandate now heads to the Ohio-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to hear a consolidated challenge after lawsuits were brought in courts throughout the country challenging the rule.