I get that, and for a while, I felt similarly. They’re probably vaccinated and don’t care. Polling suggests that 58 percent of Americans are okay with Biden’s vaccine mandate. The interest is now the workingman’s health, period. So this isn’t about the effect of COVID on the job site. Of course, Biden acknowledged that vaccinated workers are not at risk: only one in 160,000 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 has been vaccinated. ![]() In announcing his proposal, the President promised to “protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated co-workers.” This flips OSHA on its head: Instead of protecting workers from dangerous jobs, the President seeks to use OSHA to protect the workers from each other. But Biden’s unilateral extension of it certainly is. Whether OSHA is itself an unconstitutional overreach remains a subject of much debate. President Lyndon Johnson recognized these risks, and championed OSHA, arguing that, “the time has … come to do something about the effects of a workingman’s job on his health.” For example, uranium miners were developing lung cancer, and this concerning fact supported the narrative that the federal government should set some federal exposure “standards” governing an employee’s contact with hazardous substances in the workplace. The new work environment involved new and potentially dangerous chemicals. As industrial production grew after the second world war, health risks at industrial plants increased as well. The proposal is an aggressive move, divorced from the types of issues that the Occupational Health & Safety Act (”OSHA”) was designed to address. ![]() ![]() Nevertheless, the President announced it early to change the news cycle. The actual agency regulation isn’t ready for primetime, and won’t be for a bit-a fact that suggests to me, having worked in the White House for four years, that lawyers in the administration know the order is legally problematic. The Biden Administration last week proposed to use a workplace safety statute to mandate vaccines for the majority of private-sector employees.
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