As the “kitchen sink” strategy of changing the Afghanistan message continues from the White House, the announcement last week of an executive order mandating businesses with over 100 employees to force the Covid-19 vaccine on their workers continues to draw scrutiny and criticism. More and more information is coming out about how the Biden administration drafted the order and what kind of carve-out exceptions exist for certain groups and certain employers.
Starting within the federal government, of course, there are two special groups of workers who cannot be mandated, under President Biden’s order, to receive a Covid-19 vaccination:
President Joe Biden’s new vaccine mandates for federal employees don’t apply to members of Congress or those who work for Congress or the federal court system.
The New York Times reported on Thursday that the executive order doesn’t apply to those who work for Congress or the federal courts, citing White House officials.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said at a press conference on April 29 that the House couldn’t require members to be vaccinated. Video clips of those remarks gained renewed attention online following Biden’s announcement.
“So—so here is the thing. We are—we cannot require someone to be vaccinated. That’s just not what we can do. It is a matter of privacy to know who is or who isn’t,” Pelosi said.
“I can’t go to the Capitol Physician and say, ‘Give me the names of people who aren’t vaccinated, so I can go encourage them or make it known to others to encourage them to be vaccinated.’ So we can’t—we can’t do that,” she said.
It’s quite stunning that Speaker Pelosi is governed under certain rules guided by matters of privacy that prevent her from mandating a vaccination on members and aides in the House of Representatives. Is it that she can’t do it, or that she is afraid to do it for fear of backlash?
The same demands of privacy can and will be made concerning the forced vaccination of workers at companies falling under Biden’s order, but they probably won’t be respected in a similar manner.
The special treatment of Congress regarding the vaccine mandate is similar to the early days of the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) which also treated members of Congress, and their aides, differently. Due to existing federal guidelines, if congressional aides were forced to buy health insurance on an ObamaCare exchange, like ordinary Americans, their insurance costs would’ve skyrocketed and their plans would’ve been worse. As a result, a special carve-out was made to keep their insurance, and their doctors, the same as they were before Obamacare upended the health insurance market for everyone else.
Back to the Covid-19 vaccine mandate, it seems that large corporations being affected most by the order aren’t too displeased with it. The result, many of them feel, is that it releases them from fear that employees will quit and seek employment elsewhere with a company that doesn’t require the vaccine. Now, however, since Biden’s order, all the larger companies will be governed by the same rules.
For smaller businesses, just meeting the 100 employee threshold, the feelings aren’t as rosy:
The co-owner of RoMan Manufacturing, a producer of transformers and glass-molding equipment in Grand Rapids, Michigan, supports vaccination but worries about increased costs, such as for testing and administration, that small companies like his will be forced to bear. He called the new mandate “encroaching.”
“It’s easy when you sit in Washington, D.C., to say the employers will handle it,” he said.
Andreas Weller, chief executive of auto aluminum parts maker Aludyne, which employs about 3,000 people in the United States, said the mandate creates a “substantial burden” on companies. With several hundred job openings, Weller also fears the potential “devastating impact” on hiring and job retention the mandate could have.
The massive conglomerate multi-national billion-dollar corporations can afford the manpower needed to comply. The small to medium businesses with 100 or 200 employees are the ones who will be shouldering a larger burden despite the promises of providing cheaper testing kits.
There still is little word on what enforcement measures will look like or how businesses are supposed to report the vaccination status of their workforce. If an employee refuses to provide their vaccination status, are they supposed to be fired from their job? These kinds of questions still remain.
As for exemptions, such as a religious or medical exemption, the Biden administration will be monitoring them for misuse:
U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy has advised that the Biden administration will “monitor” to ensure no one abuses COVID-19 vaccine exemptions.
“Unfortunately, as a country, we have experience in dealing with exemptions, but we’ve got to be vigilant there and make sure that people are using them, you know, in the spirit that they’re intended and not abusing them or asking for exemptions when they don’t apply,” Murthy told CNN’s “State of the Union.” “That’s an area that we continue to monitor in the days and weeks ahead.”
As it stands today, it will likely be several weeks before companies, and the states seeking to challenge Biden’s mandate, will get a look at what the actual standard will require:
White House officials said OSHA was likely to take at least three or four weeks to write the new standard, partly because it must complete certain time-consuming steps to ensure that the rule passes legal muster. Among them are rigorously demonstrating that workers face a grave danger at work, that the rule is necessary to defuse that danger and that it is feasible for employers to carry out.
OSHA must also sort through a number of practical questions, such as who pays for the testing and what kinds of tests are acceptable.
Until then, businesses of all sizes will have to take a “wait and see” approach to just how onerous this top-down presidential order will directly affect their bottom line.
It’s also entirely plausible that a court may put a hold on the order before it even goes into effect.
