Biden Administration asks Appeals Court to allow OSHA vaccine mandate

The Biden administration asked a federal appeals court on Tuesday to reinstate its Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) vaccine mandate.

The Justice Department filed a motion on Tuesday urging the U.S. Court of Appeals of the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati to lift a judicial stay on the OSHA rule while it is being challenged in court.

OSHA mandates that businesses with 100 or more employees have to ensure that their employees are vaccinated against Covid-19 or submit them to weekly testing. Unvaccinated employees have to wear masks. Violators could face fines of up to thousands of dollars.

Two days after the administration published the OSHA rule, the Louisiana-based Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily blocked the mandate that was scheduled to go into effect on January 4.

The ruling described the mandate as “fatally flawed” and told the administration not to enforce the requirement “pending adequate judicial review.”

The panel of judges at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals said 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."

On Tuesday, the Biden administration claimed that the Court of Appeals misinterpreted the mandate.

“The Fifth Circuit’s stay should be lifted immediately,” said the Justice Department. “That court’s principal rationale was that OSHA allegedly lacked statutory authority to address the grave danger of COVID-19 in the workplace on the ground that COVID-19 is caused by a virus and also exists outside the workplace. That rationale has no basis in the statutory text.”

Based on estimates that the vaccine mandate could prevent more than 6,500 deaths and 250,000 hospitalizations in the next six months, White House lawyers said that "delaying the standard would likely cost many lives per day, in addition to large numbers of hospitalizations, other serious health effects, and tremendous expenses,” adding that “That is a confluence of harms of the highest order.”

While the OSHA rule has not yet been approved, the Biden administration is urging companies to still abide by its recommendations.

“Our message to businesses right now is to move forward with measures that will make their workplaces safer and protect their workforces from COVID-19,” said press secretary Jen Psaki. “That was our message after the first stay issued by the 5th Circuit. That remains our message, and nothing has changed.”