The legal hits just keep on coming for the beleaguered Biden administration and its attempt to impose a vaccine mandate on most of the U.S. working population. This time, a federal judge in Missouri put a block on a Covid vaccine mandate stemming from Medicare and Medicaid which stated that any healthcare providers participating in the federal programs would need to be fully vaccinated by the end of December.
For the time being, the stay only applies to the 10 states which brought the lawsuit: Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming.
In the ruling, the Judge called Biden’s mandate on healthcare workers “unprecedented” in the way it imposed a federal burden regarding matters reserved as state issues:
The court order said that the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid had no clear authority from Congress to enact the vaccine mandate for providers participating in the two government health care programs for the elderly, disabled and poor.
The preliminary injunction by St. Louis-based U.S. District Judge Matthew Schelp applies to a coalition of suing states that includes Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming. All those states have either a Republican attorney general or governor. Similar lawsuits also are pending in other states.
Even under an exceedingly broad interpretation of federal powers, Congress did not clearly authorize CMS to enact “this politically and economically vast, federalism-altering, and boundary-pushing mandate,” wrote Schelp, who was appointed to the bench by former President Donald Trump.
Earlier in November, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals destroyed Biden’s mandate on private businesses which was set to be enacted by January 4 after weeks of delays and exemptions for various industries. This ruling, regarding healthcare workers, provides more insight into just how unstable and illegal these kinds of federal mandates are when pushed broadly across the country using methods and statutes never designed for such intrusive breaches into personal liberty and individual autonomy.
It’s stunning how poorly conceived and executed these mandates were from the start. In this case, the Biden administration relied on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to enact the mandate despite having no clear statutory authority to do so. Once again, it appears that these executive orders were intended to bolster vaccine rates by nudging workers and facilities into compliance with the expectation the order wouldn’t hold up in court over the long term.
Here we are at that point down the road where Biden’s Covid mandates are being dismantled day by day, but that does not change the effect of someone already being forced into the vaccine against their will to keep their job.
Once again, as has been the case, none of these mandates or Biden orders take into account natural immunity or give much respect to accommodation requests. If a healthcare worker has already had Covid, especially a recent case, there seems to be little evidence that the addition of vaccination does much to expand the body’s natural protection. There is simply no reason to try and forcibly reach an impossible 100% vaccination goal.
The stay, in this case, will allow some facilities to actually remain open since there have been several situations around the country where hospitals and care centers have closed due to staff shortages relating to the vaccine mandate:
Officials in several states also praised the court ruling. New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu said “nursing homes were at risk of closure” if the mandate remained.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds said the vaccine is the best defense against COVID-19, but medical providers “deserve the freedom and ability to make their own informed health care decisions.”
Eventually, the Biden administration will get around to a better plan than forced vaccinations as their primary weapon against Covid. For now, they will have to settle with mounting losses and more lawsuits in the pipeline that threaten to further derail and defang Biden’s federal Covid vaccine mandates.
