The Occupational Safety and Health Administration announced it will extend the deadline for its employer vaccine mandate once again, even though the rule is supposed to address an “emergency.”
The agency said employers now have until Jan. 10 to implement President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate, which requires all businesses with more than 100 employees to require vaccination against COVID-19 or weekly testing. Noncompliance citations for businesses that don’t implement the mandate won’t be issued until Feb. 9, according to the Washington Examiner.
The announcement followed a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit over the weekend allowing the vaccine mandate to take effect.
The agency said it is “gratified the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit dissolved the Fifth Circuit’s stay of the Vaccination and Testing Emergency Temporary Standard,” but noted it wants to “provide employers with sufficient time to come into compliance.”
Biden’s vaccine mandate has lost in court several times, but the 6th Circuit upheld it this weekend, claiming that “OSHA has demonstrated the pervasive danger that COVID-19 poses to workers – unvaccinated workers in particular – in their workplaces.”
However, the danger is clearly not so urgent that OSHA can’t delay its enforcement, as several critics have pointed out.
One such critics, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, vowed to continue fighting the “unconstitutional” mandate in court – all the way up to the Supreme Court if that becomes necessary.
A bad decision by a left-leaning panel (Bush ddand Obama judges) of the 6th Cir.
It’s un-American to force an unconst vax mandate on private biz, forcing people to choose b/w unemployment & an irreversible med procedure.
I will immediately take this to SCOTUS to seek a reversal. https://t.co/GoqdrC9GXv
— Attorney General Ken Paxton (@KenPaxtonTX) December 18, 2021
