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South Carolina Governor Henry McMasterAlex Wong / Staff / Getty

COLUMBIA, South Carolina (LifeSiteNews) — South Carolina’s Republican Gov. Henry McMaster issued an executive order Thursday to ensure that state agencies not only abstain from mandating COVID-19 vaccines for their own employees, but also cooperate with efforts to legally resist federal mandates.

Executive Order 2021-38 “prohibits all state agencies in his cabinet from requiring employees to receive the COVID-19 vaccine,” and “directs every agency in state government to immediately notify the Office of the Governor and the Office of the South Carolina Attorney General upon receiving any communication or directives from the Biden Administration concerning COVID-19 vaccination requirements,” the governor’s office announced Thursday.

McMaster, who along with state Attorney General Alan Wilson is preparing to challenge in court the White House’s vaccine mandates on federal contractors and private employers with 100 or more workers, said Thursday he is “stunned at the overreach of the Biden Administration” in “forcing South Carolinians to choose between a vaccine and their jobs … I have never seen a president go out of bounds, out of bounds of the law as this one.” 

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.” He also announced new vaccination rules for federal employees and government contractors.

Yesterday, almost two months later, OSHA released the official details of the rule, which will take effect January 4, 2022. It is expected to affect around 84 million employees from around 1.9 million private businesses, further exacerbating staffing shortages across the U.S. economy.

South Carolina recently joined Georgia’s lawsuit against the contractor mandate, and McMaster says additional steps against the business mandate are in the works.

Such mandates are a reaction to the fact that many Americans continue to harbor reservations about the COVID vaccines, stemming 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 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 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 US 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.

Further, a growing body of data indicates that the mass vaccination strategy for defeating COVID-19 has failed, thereby undermining the rationale for mandates. The federal government considers more than 193 million Americans (58% of the eligible) to be “fully vaccinated,” yet ABC News reported last month 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.

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