Court temporarily blocks Biden’s vaccine mandate

A federal appeals panel in Louisiana has temporarily blocked the Biden administration’s new rule directing businesses with 100 or more workers to require their employees to get vaccinations against the coronavirus or weekly tests by early January.

The three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit granted a temporary stay to a group of businesses, religious groups, advocacy organizations and several states, including Louisiana and Texas, that had filed a petition Friday with the court, arguing that the administration had overstepped its authority.

The stay doesn’t have an immediate impact. The first major deadline in the new rule, as detailed Thursday, is Dec. 5. That’s the day that large companies must require unvaccinated employees to wear masks indoors. Companies have until Jan. 4 to mandate coronavirus vaccinations or start weekly testing of their workers.

The rule is expected to cover 84 million workers, roughly 31 million of whom are unvaccinated. It lays out the specifics of a plan President Joe Biden first announced in September.

At the core of the legal challenge is the question of whether OSHA exceeded its authority in issuing the rule and whether such a mandate would need to be passed by Congress.

The states’ suit said that the president “set the legislative policy” of substantially increasing the number of Americans covered by vaccination requirements, and “then set binding rules enforced with the threat of large fines.”

“That is a quintessential legislative act — and one wholly unrelated to the purpose of OSHA itself, which is protecting workplace safety,” the suit said. “Nowhere in OSHA’S enabling legislation does Congress confer upon it the power to end pandemics.”

A separate lawsuit against the new rule was also filed on Friday in the Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit in St. Louis by 11 Republican-led states, among them Texas, Mississippi, South Carolina

and Utah.

The 5th Circuit panel said in a brief order, signed by a deputy clerk, that the judges were blocking the regulation “because the petitions give cause to believe there are grave statutory and constitutional issues with the mandate.” It said the rule was suspended “pending further action by this court.”

The two-page order directed the Biden administration to respond by Monday to the group’s request for a permanent injunction.

Seema Nanda, the chief legal officer for the Department of Labor, said in a statement that the government was confident in its legal authority to issue the mandate on vaccinations and testing.