16 States Challenge Biden’s Federal Vaccine Mandate For Healthcare Workers
States are fighting back against the Biden administration’s COVID tyranny.
Sixteen states are suing the Biden administration over their federal vaccine mandate for healthcare workers.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has issued a statement on the state’s joint lawsuit with 15 other states regarding the federal healthcare worker vaccine mandate.
In November of last year, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) published regulations which required healthcare providers which work with Medicare and Medicaid to be vaccinated. The Supreme Court earlier this month issued an opinion which allowed the mandate to remain in place for the time being but did squash the OSHA mandate which required employers with 100 or more employees to require vaccines.
Now, 16 states, including Tennessee are challenging the CMS mandate in a lawsuit filed today in the Western District of Louisiana.
The states are pointing out that the vaccine mandate was meant to deal with the Delta variant which is no longer the dominant variant in the United States.
The rule, signed by Health Secretary Xavier Becerra, repeatedly references the danger the Delta virus variant poses to the unvaccinated, and says that vaccines “continue to be effective in preventing COVID-19 associated with the now-dominant Delta variant.”
…
But as of mid-December 2021, the Omicron virus variant is the dominant strain in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, another agency within HHS.
“It is now established beyond any serious question that the secretary’s speculation was wrong. The Delta variant effectively disappeared from the scene within weeks of the issuance of the rule,” the states say.
The primary series of COVID-19 vaccines, required by the mandate, provide little protection against infection from Omicron and reduced protection against severe disease, studies show. “Just about everybody” will contract the variant, Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, has said.
“The mandate was promulgated in response to the Delta variant, which now accounts for only 0.1 percent of all COVID-19 cases in the United States. But research suggests that COVID-19 vaccines do little to stop the transmission of the predominant strain today—the Omicron variant, which accounts for 99.9 percent of all cases—which undermines the premise for forcing people to submit to them,” Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, a Republican representing one of the 16 challenging states, said in a statement.
The Supreme Court ruled against Biden’s vaccine mandate for private business but ruled in favor of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services vaccine mandate.
