The Biden administration has announced new OSHA vaccine mandates for businesses that have more than 100 employees. The Federalist. The mandate would force employers to mandate vaccines or weekly testing and masking for unvaccinated employees. The company would not be required to pay for the testing and the testing option would be optional. Businesses will have until January 4th, 2022 to comply or they would face massive fines. There was no provision for natural immunity, which protects people who have previously had the virus. They have also asked businesses if they can expand the mandate to smaller employers as well. Republican politicians have blasted the order with many filing suit or launching executive orders making it a crime to try and enforce the rules. The Daily Wire, a conservative news outlet, has also filed a lawsuit.
My Comment:
Absolutely baffling move by the Biden administration as this order makes no sense. On every level this seems like yet another massive own goal by the administration for no real gain. The measure will be extremely unpopular, it won't do a damn thing to stop the virus and will galvanize Biden's political opponents. Not to mention the absolutely devastating effect this policy will have if it ever comes into effect.
The mandate is totally pointless as it will do nothing to stop the pandemic. The virus still spreads even in countries that have higher vaccination rates than we have. This is not a problem we can vaccinate our way out of as the vaccines just aren't effective enough against the Delta variant. Which is not a surprise as the vaccines were based on the original Wuhan strain and have not been updated in anyway to deal with the newer variants. And obviously, the mask mandate won't do a thing either as if masks worked this pandemic would have been done last year.
The order will be extremely unpopular to the point I am worried about violence. You can't mess with people's lives like this and not expect them to fight back. Putting millions of people out of work will push people to the point where they will have nothing to lose. I am honestly surprised that there hasn't been some major act of political violence because of these mandates.
Politically this is a huge mistake by Biden. He just gave the Republican Party another bullet in their magazine to use against him in 2022. All they have to run on now is "no more mandates" and they will win in a landslide. They will raise a ton of money on this too, as people are going to be willing to put their money where their mouth is. And I get the feeling that the GOP's win in Virginia and other races across the country last Tuesday was due in part to Biden's Coronavirus policy.
But the biggest problem that this mandate will cause, if it somehow comes into effect, is economic damage. At my business we have about an 80% vaccination rate. If this comes into effect and there is no testing option we would lose 20% of our workforce and would not be able to operate. And our vaccination rate is a lot better than most of the country. There will be some industries where up to 50% of workers will lose their jobs and the companies will go out of business.
This will make everything worse. Prices will go up due to the cost of production skyrocketing. The transportation backlog will get worse as truck drivers get fired, quit or retire in response to this mandate. Hospitals and clinics will turn away patients because they don't have nurses or doctors (this is already happening).
And the timing makes zero sense. If the Coronavirus was such an emergency, why did they delay it until after the holidays? And why implement it at all when cases are down across the board? To be honest, if it wasn't for the media coverage I wouldn't know there was a pandemic at all. I know a few people that caught it recently, but they are all fine and to date nobody I know has died from this virus.
I don't think people will comply with this because I already know that people aren't complying with anything coronavirus related anymore. My company has a mask mandate but the masks come off whenever a supervisor isn't around. Masking signs are pretty much completely ignored in public. Everyone is done with this virus and I think any company that tries to push this will face pushback from their employees.
In the end though I don't think this regulation will go into place. Already dozens of major lawsuits have been filed and I think they have a good chance of winning. OSHA regulations don't have a good history of succeeding and the legal grounds for overturning the mandate seem good. And even if they fail, any state with GOP leadership is likely to nullify this stupid mandate.
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