the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Washington DC, the United States’ “vaccine mandate”* was put on hold following a ruling by a 3-judge panel of the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals. The panel concluded that the mandate, an Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) that generally applies to companies and organizations with 100 or more employees, is “staggeringly overbroad” and does not sufficiently account for variations in working conditions and environments. The panel concluded that the policy should be suspended until the case can be argued in court. Lawyers from the Biden Administration appealed the initial panel ruling, arguing that a delay in implementing the mandate could result in many unnecessary deaths, but the judges upheld the initial decision. In its ruling, the panel described the policy as “fatally flawed” and indicated that lawsuits aiming to overturn it “are likely to succeed on their merits,” which suggests that the White House could face an uphill battle to institute the mandate in January.
