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(LifeSiteNews) — Conservative media outlet The Daily Wire has no intention of complying with the Biden administration’s impending mandate that businesses with more than 100 employees require them to take the COVID-19 vaccines, with conservative pundit Ben Shapiro confirming that the organization is “staffing up” to fight the “tyrannical and authoritarian order” in court.

On September 9, President Joe Biden announced that he was directing the U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL’s) Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to draft a rule that will, according to the White House, “require all employers with 100 or more employees to ensure their workforce is fully vaccinated or require any workers who remain unvaccinated to produce a negative test result on at least a weekly basis before coming to work.” 

Biden also announced new vaccination rules for federal employees and government contractors, but the bulk of the controversy focused on the administration’s intrusion into the decisions of private-sector employers and employees, which is expected to affect more than 80 million Americans.

The Daily Wire, which Shapiro co-founded with Jeremy Boreing in 2015, promptly responded to the news with an announcement that it “does have more than 100 employees,” but will “use every tool at our disposal including legal action to resist.”

The next day, Shapiro appeared on Fox & Friends to elaborate on the company’s position.

“We’re going to use every method and resource at our disposal to defy the president’s unconstitutional order,” Shapiro reiterated. “And this is coming from somebody who’s very pro-vaccine. I was vaccinated as soon as possible; I’ve encouraged everybody to get the vaccine, or pretty much everybody to get the vaccine.”

However, he continued, “the notion that the federal government has the ability to force every business in America with over 100 employees — by the way, I’m not sure why it’s over 100 employees, theoretically, it should be every business in America because you can get infected anywhere — every business in America with over 100 employees to either force its employees to vaccinate or force them to test every week or fire them presumably.”

“We are staffing up right now on the legal side,” Shapiro went on. “We are already getting any lawsuit ready that needs to be gotten ready. We have to see the actual regulations, know the details of that lawsuit. What we can tell you is that the provisions that Joe Biden is going to be citing under OSHA are wildly overbroad.”

Calling Biden a “failed president on every level,” Shapiro suggested the 78-year-old Democrat was “attempting to redirect all of the ire at his presidency at your fellow Americans,” particularly the unvaccinated, and that the mandate was another indicator that Biden had failed in his early promise that “I’m not going to shut down the economy; I’m not going to shut down the country; I’m going to shut down the virus.” 

Shapiro further predicted that this mandate may have the unintended effect of provoking the U.S. Supreme Court into a “complete rewriting of the administrative state because Joe Biden couldn’t get his act in order, and so he decided to issue a tyrannical and authoritarian order here.” 

The Biden administration’s promotion of COVID-19 vaccination has grown steadily more aggressive, previously announcing it intended to send representatives door to door to urge Americans to do so. At the same time, critics say the White House has undermined vaccine confidence with its refusal to disclose how many of its own staffers contracted COVID-19 after vaccination, as well as the president’s recent false claim that “you’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”

Many Americans remain concerned that the vaccines have not been sufficiently studied for negative effects given their accelerated clinical trials.

Vaccine defenders note that the one-year development period was not starting from scratch, but rather relied on years of prior research into mRNA technology; and that one of the innovations of the Trump administration’s “Operation Warp Speed” was conducting various aspects of the development process concurrently rather than sequentially, eliminating delays unrelated to safety. However, those factors do not fully account for the condensing of clinical trial phases — each of which can take anywhere from 1–3 years on their own — to just three months apiece. 

While cases of severe harm reported to the federal Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) after taking COVID vaccines represent less than one percent of total doses administered in the United States, a 2010 report submitted to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services’ (HHS) Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) warned that VAERS caught “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events.”

This past May, NBC News published a report acknowledging experts’ concerns about “gaps” in federal monitoring of the COVID vaccines. While the government currently relies on a “hodgepodge” of sources for safety data, the report explained, the quoted experts call for a more “robust ‘active’ surveillance system [that] can search large volumes of patient care records to compare rates of adverse events in people who received vaccines with those who didn’t.”

Beyond the question of safety, some harbor ethical reservations about the use of cells from aborted babies in the COVID vaccines’ development. Still other simply consider them unnecessary given COVID-19’s high survivability among most groups, low risk of asymptomatic spread, and research indicating that post-infection natural immunity is actually more protective against reinfection.

So far, more than twenty Republican-controlled states have said they are planning or exploring lawsuits against the Biden vaccine mandate. LifeSiteNews has also prepared a resource to help readers facing such mandates at work pursue and defend religious, medical, or conscience exemptions.

LifeSiteNews has produced an extensive COVID-19 vaccines resources page. View it here.