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White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki

WASHINGTON (LifeSiteNews) — Days after the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) announced that it will comply with a federal court order not to enforce the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate on American businesses, the White House says it still wants businesses to carry out the mandate on their own.

“Our message to businesses right now is to move forward with measures that will make their workplaces safer and protect their workforces from COVID-19,” Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday, the Epoch Times reports. “That was our message after the first stay issued by the Fifth Circuit. That remains our message and nothing has changed.”

“We are still heading towards the same timeline” of a January 4, 2021 deadline for implementation, she continued. “The Department of Justice is vigorously defending the emergency temporary standard in court and we are confident in OSHA’s authority.”

On September 9, President Joe Biden announced he was directing OSHA to draft a rule to “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.” OSHA released the official details of the rule almost two months later. If it takes effect, it is expected to affect around 84 million employees from roughly 1.9 million private businesses, further exacerbating staffing shortages across the U.S. economy.

Numerous states and private entities sued the administration in response, and last week a panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily blocked the mandate over “grave statutory and constitutional issues,” then rejected a Biden administration appeal to lift the stay, finding that the mandate “grossly exceeds OSHA’s statutory authority.” 

The Fifth Circuit ordered OSHA to “take no steps to implement or enforce” the Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) “until further court order.” In response, OSHA confirmed that it “has suspended activities related to the implementation and enforcement of the ETS pending future developments in the litigation.”

Psaki’s comments do not carry the force of law, but appear to signal the administration’s intentions to continue informally pushing businesses to force vaccination on their employees regardless of the law.

Meanwhile, evidence continues to mount undermining the vaccine mandate’s rationale, with a growing body of data indicating that the mass vaccination strategy for defeating COVID-19 has failed. The federal government considers more than 194 million Americans (58% of the eligible) to be “fully vaccinated” (a moving target given the vaccines’ temporary nature), yet ABC News reported on October 6 that more Americans died of COVID-19 this year (353,000) than in all of 2020 (352,000), according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

Noncompliance is further driven by significant unaddressed concerns about the vaccines’ safety, stemming largely from the fact that they were developed and released far faster than any previous vaccine.

Defenders stress that their development did not start from scratch, but rather relied on years of prior research into mRNA technology; and that one of the innovations of 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 Event Reporting System (VAERS) after taking COVID shots 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.” May reporting from NBC News quotes several mainstream experts acknowledging “gaps” in federal vaccine monitoring.

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