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WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – The Biden administration has announced its COVID jab mandate for workers, threating fines of up to $136,532 for repeated non-compliance.

Today the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) released details of its “Emergency Temporary Standard” for COVID-19 vaccination and testing, officially requiring businesses of 100 employees or more to force workers to take the abortion-tainted jab before January 4, 2022, or face crippling fines.

Following an announcement from President Joe Biden in September in which he outlined the government’s plan to require companies with more than 100 staff to mandate inoculation against the novel coronavirus for their workforce, OSHA has confirmed that affected employers “must develop, implement, and enforce a mandatory COVID-19 vaccination policy.”

The policy must reflect the agency’s criteria for “full vaccination,” which is to have received at least two shots of either the Pfizer or Moderna mRNA jabs or one shot of the Johnson & Johnson jab.

OSHA detailed a provision for employers to allow unvaccinated staff to remain in work, forcing such individuals to “undergo regular COVID-19 testing and wear a face covering at work,” according to a press statement.

The mandate will affect around 84 million employees from around 1.9 million private businesses, according to a Reuters report.

In addition, the Biden administration has a separate vaccine requirement for federal contractors and government employees, which will also be enforced on January 4, as well as a mandate for Medicare and Medicaid healthcare workers to receive the shots by the same date. In all, over 100 million people (two-thirds of the American workforce) will be impacted by the order.

As well as implementing a strict COVID “vaccine” policy, OSHA’s emergency standard requires affected employers to ascertain the COVID jab status of every employee and to “obtain acceptable proof” of it, developing and maintaining a “roster of each employee’s vaccination status.”

Employers must also report “work-related COVID-19 fatalities” and hospitalizations directly to OSHA.

The standard comes into effect this Friday, at which point it will be published in the Federal Register. OSHA has included a 60-day window for employers to comply with the measures, making January 4, 2022, the effective deadline.

After this date, employers who fail to comply with the dictate will face fines of up to $13,653 per employee violation. The obligation to police the new order rests on the shoulders of employers, and OSHA has said it will conduct inspections in order to confirm compliance rather than relying on self-reporting.

Employers will have the right to request OSHA inspectors obtain a warrant before allowing them access to their property.

So-called “repeat offenders” deemed to be “wilfully noncompliant” will be subject to an upper limit fine of $136,532.

According to OSHA, the impetus behind the requirement is that “[t]he nation’s unvaccinated workers face grave danger from workplace exposure to coronavirus, and immediate action is necessary to protect them.”

An OSHA official said that the agency “estimates that this rule will save thousands of lives and prevent over 250,000 hospitalizations during the six months after implementation,” but provided no supporting evidence for the claim.

Meanwhile the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) continues to rack up injury and death reports following reception of the COVID-19 shots.

Between December 14, 2020, and October 22, 2021, a total of 837,595 injury reports have been registered on the VAERS database following COVID inoculation. Of this number, 17,619 reports are of deaths in the weeks and months after taking a COVID jab.

While causation is not explicitly confirmed through the VAERS reporting system, neither can it be presumed that all side effects are reported. Indeed, one study in 2010 found that “fewer than 1% of vaccine injuries” are reported to VAERS, suggesting the actual numbers of deaths and injuries are significantly higher.

OSHA expects that people will experience injury from the shots

OSHA’s order requires affected employers to facilitate reception of a COVID jab for their staff, demanding that they carve out up to four hours of time for each worker to receive their “primary vaccination series dose(s)” at their regular rate of pay.

Additionally, OSHA expects that people will experience injury from the shots, building in a requirement for employers to “provide reasonable time and paid sick leave to recover from side effects experienced following any primary vaccination series dose to each employee for each dose.” No upper or lower limits of time have been delineated.

Legal challenges launched against the mandate

Legal challenges to the mandate have been expected, with conservative news outlet The Daily Wire among the first to announce that it is suing the federal government over its vaccination order.

Company CEO Jeremy Boreing said in a statement that “The Daily Wire will not comply with President Biden’s tyrannical vaccine mandate, and we are suing the Biden Administration to put a stop to their gross overreach.”

“President Biden, the federal government, social media, and the establishment media have conspired to rob Americans of their freedoms in the name of public health. They have broken faith with the American people through conflicting messaging, false information, and by suppressing data and perspectives with which they disagree.”

Harmeet K. Dhillon of Dhillon Law Group, one of the legal teams suing on behalf of The Daily Wire, said that the federal government has neither the authority “to compel private employers to play the role of vaccine or COVID police,” nor “the police power to force private employees to undergo medical treatment.”

“The Biden administration’s attempt to impose this unprecedented and unlawful federal medical mandate on the U.S. workforce without considering the public’s views is arbitrary, capricious, unsupported by the evidence, and would produce a wilfully ignorant rule,” Dhillon stated.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) filed a lawsuit against the federal government on October 28 over the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate for federal contractors.