WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – Today the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments regarding the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates for private employers and federally-funded health facilities, with Americans expected to gather outside to demonstrate their opposition to the forced shots.
In September, President Joe Biden directed the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety & Health Administration (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,” as well as a mandate for around 17 million healthcare workers at medical facilities that receive Medicare and Medicaid funding and one for federal contractors which accounts for roughly a fifth of the U.S. labor market. The health worker and contractor mandates contain no testing option.
On December 21, Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked the administration to submit responses to challenges of the employer and health worker mandates, then scheduled oral arguments for January 7. The employer mandate was scheduled to take effect January 4, but the administration says it will not begin enforcing it until January 10, and will not enforce the health mandate until the legal dispute is resolved.
Publicly the White House maintains confidence the mandates will prevail, but leaked audio reveals Biden Justice Department attorney Martin Lederman privately acknowledging it “will be very difficult for agencies to successfully claim” that conscience objections to the shots, which were developed and/or tested with cells from aborted babies, are “either insincere or not religious.”
To overcome that, Lederman says, the government will have to show there is a “compelling interest” in “keeping our workforce and the public with which we interact safe from COVID.” But widespread dissemination of the vaccines has failed to end the pandemic so far, to the point that prominent administration officials and their media allies have recently begun reversing several of their longstanding COVID talking points on masking, isolation, and hospital data.
The push to vaccinate the majority of the world’s population in order to prevent serious disease for those who are not at risk to begin with – the CDC reports an infection survival rate of greater than 99.95% for those under age 50 — adds to the skepticism surrounding the increased push for COVID booster shots. Meanwhile the list of FDA-recognized adverse events has grown from severe anaphylactic reactions to include fatal thrombotic events, the inflammatory heart condition myocarditis, and neurologically disabling disease like Guillain Barré Syndrome, as well as thousands of recorded deaths and permanent disabilities.
Coronavirus vaccine trials have never produced evidence that the vaccines stop infection or transmission. They do not even claim to reduce hospitalization, but the measurement of success is in preventing severe symptoms of COVID-19 disease. Moreover, there is strong evidence that the “vaccinated” are just as likely to carry and transmit the virus as the unvaccinated.
While conservatives argue the mandates are a clear enough overreach of presidential power that the case’s outcome should be straightforward, it remains to be seen how a majority of justices make the decision. The justices have denied reviews of state-level COVID vaccine mandates in Indiana, Maine, Massachusetts, New Mexico, and most recently New York, with Trump-appointed Justices Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett joining the court’s liberals.
Other coronavirus vaccine mandates for the U.S. military, federal workers, and federal contractors are making their way through the courts.
LifeSiteNews has produced an extensive COVID-19 vaccines resources page. View it here.