Washington:
Republican governors are expected to sue Friday to block the Biden administration’s requirement that nearly 2 million US employers test workers or vaccinate them for COVID-19, saying it trampled civil liberties.
President Joe Biden, a Democrat, said Thursday that he would implement the mandate starting January 4, after Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said he was ready to file suit with the governors of Georgia and Alabama, as well as private plaintiffs. will be involved.
“The federal government cannot simply unilaterally enforce a medical policy under the guise of workplace regulation,” Mr DeSantis said at a news conference.
Republican governors of Indiana, Iowa and Nebraska also vowed to challenge the move in court.
The regulation was implemented as a rarely used emergency rule from OSHA, or the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the federal workplace regulator.
“Biden announces his plan to run OSHA to mandate vaccines on private businesses,” Ken Paxton, the Republican’s Texas Attorney General, wrote on Twitter on Thursday. “Once this illegal, unconstitutional regulation hits the Federal Register I am announcing my plans to prosecute it.”
Texas is one of the Republican-led states that has issued executive orders or enacted laws that ban COVID-19 vaccine mandates or prohibit employers from seeking an employee’s vaccination status.
OSHA said the rule takes precedence over conflicting state laws. It will take effect from Friday when it is published in the Federal Register.
At least two lawsuits were launched against Mandate on Thursday, one by Philips Manufacturing & Tower and Sixerp LLC and the other by Bentaki Services LLC, which owns The Daily Wire, a conservative media company. Both were filed in the Sixth US Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati.
Responding to opponents of the rule, a senior administration official said OSHA clearly has the authority to act to protect workers from health and safety hazards. COVID-19 has killed more than 745,000 people in the United States.
Mr Biden said in September that patience was thin with the 30% of Americans who live without vaccinations and who made up the majority of those hospitalized during the most recent wave of COVID-19 infections.
Mandates to increase COVID-19 vaccination rates have been used by private businesses and local governments and courts have generally upheld them because states usually have the power to regulate healthcare within their borders. .
A wide range of opponents have indicated their intention to sue. Past uses of OSHA’s emergency rule have a history of being blocked in court.
Even if the courts upheld the mandate, some states still cannot enforce this rule.
OSHA applies to private workplaces in 29 states. The remaining states, including Indiana and Iowa, have their own state-run OSHA that is required to adopt federal rule.
OSHA issued a similar COVID-19 rule for health care settings in June, and in October the federal agency threatened to take over state-run OSHA agencies in Arizona, South Carolina and Utah for failing to adopt it. Arizona and South Carolina have since said they have begun the process of adopting the rule. Officials in Utah did not respond to a request for comment.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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