US court reinstates Biden’s vaccine mandate for big businesses

Appeals court allows Joe Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine or test rules for large businesses to move ahead.

An appeals court in the United States has reinstated President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for large businesses.

Friday’s ruling by the Sixth US Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati reversed a decision by a federal judge in a separate court that had paused the mandate.

The rule from the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) applies to businesses with at least 100 workers and covers 80 mil lion American workers.

It was due to take effect on January 4.

Republican-led states joined with conservative groups, business associations and some individual businesses to push back against the requirement as soon as OSHA published the rules in early November. They argued the agency was not authorised to make the emergency rule, in part because the coronavirus is a general health risk and not one just faced by employees at work.

The panel’s majority disagreed.

“Given OSHA’s clear and exercised authority to regulate viruses, OSHA necessarily has the authority to regulate infectious diseases that are not unique to the workplace,” Judge Julia Smith Gibbons, who was nominated to the court by former President George W Bush, wrote in her majority opinion.

“Vaccination and medical examinations are both tools that OSHA historically employed to contain illness in the workplace,” she wrote.

Gibbons said the rule “is not a novel expansion of OSHA’s power; it is an existing application of authority to a novel and dangerous worldwide pandemic”.

SOURCE: NEWS AGENCIES