The pair of requirements, which would affect tens of millions of workers, have been in legal limbo since agencies published them last year
The Supreme Court on Friday weighed whether a pair of vaccine-related mandates from the Biden administration governing large businesses and health care facilities can move forward, putting on display the national divide over Covid-19 vaccination and highlighting the latest surge, driven by the Omicron variant.
But Justice Clarence Thomas questioned whether the current danger from Covid amounted to the kind of crisis that justified the Occupational Safety and Health Administration using an expedited process issuing an "emergency temporary standard" requiring most workplaces with more than 100 workers to enforce a vaccinate-or-mask-and-test mandate.
However, U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar told the court that the statute authorizing OSHA specifically mentions vaccines and that the need for action is critical.By the end of the three-and-a-half-hour session, the high court's Republican-appointed majority sounded And Roberts said Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra appeared entitled to some deference in what sorts of controls his department imposes.
Osete said the Biden administration failed to take account of the impact in much of the country. “What may work in Detroit and Houston, may actually be counterproductive in Memphis, Missouri, or for that matter, El Dorado, Ark.,” he said. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, an appointee of President Donald Trump, suggested it was odd that states were putting up a fight, while most hospitals and nursing homes have not. "The people who are regulated are not here complaining about the regulation," he said.
A court spokesperson said Sotomayor, also an Obama appointee, chose to join from her chambers in the Supreme Court building. She has suffered from diabetes since childhood and wore a mask at prior in-person arguments even when other justices did not. Flowers told the justices he is "triple-vaccinated" and that his recent infection showed that "vaccines do not appear to be very effective at stopping the spread or transmission" of the new variant. He also said the ease of contracting the virus just about anywhere highlights that the OSHA rule doesn't really address a work-related problem.
However, the justices’ questions Friday and their ruling could provide hints of the ultimate fate of the vaccine mandates — and of how the administration will approach their implementation as it awaits a final decision. “Even in OSHA’s rose-colored view, the Mandate imposes vaccine-or-testing requirements for 84 million Americans … and imposes these requirements on every single industry in the country, amounting to over 264,000 businesses,” Job Creators Network, a business group among those leading the charge against the regulations, said in a filing with the Supreme Court.