Currently, as the nation's private workforce awaits a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court on whether it will reinstate the stay on OSHA's COVID-19 vaccine mandate for companies with over 100 employees, employers have until Jan. 10 to comply with weekly testing requirements for employees who are not fully vaccinated.
In an emergency application filed in late December seeking to halt Joe Biden's draconian vaccine directives, Plaintiff attorney Aaron Siri asked the Supreme Court to correct the Sixth Circuit's Dec. 17 ruling. The ruling allowed OSHA to proceed with enforcing its Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) while numerous lawsuits are pending. Initially, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals halted the planned implementation of the mandate.
Siri's case is one of many lawsuits asking the Supreme Court to step in and block the Biden administration from using the specifically crafted OSHA ETS to enforce its vaccine mandate for large companies. The bulk of the lawsuits mainly argue that the administration overstepped its constitutional authority by issuing the ETS to push Biden's vaccine agenda.
In their "Response in Opposition to the Applications for a Stay," filed following an order by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, OSHA and the other federal agencies defend that "Congress charged OSHA with setting nationwide standards to protect the health and safety of American workers." The government agencies went on to argue the ETS was based upon the "grave danger" presented by the virus. The response asserted:
"Confronted with the deadliest pandemic in the Nation's history, which has infected more than 50 million and killed more than 800,000 people in the United States alone, OSHA found that workers are becoming seriously ill and dying because they are exposed to the virus that causes COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, on the job—including in widespread and well-documented workplace clusters and outbreaks."
Screenshot / MedAlerts - Of the 9,623 U.S. deaths reported as of Dec. 24, 20% occurred within 24 hours of vaccination, 25% occurred within 48 hours of vaccination and 61% occurred in people who experienced an onset of symptoms within 48 hours of being vaccinated.
The 87-page response by OSHA, the Department of Labor, and other government agencies supports the opinion held by many that Biden's jab narrative was purposely designed to entice employers to implement stringent vaccine requirements regardless of federal mandates. The Government's response explained:
"OSHA further determined that effective disease-control measures that have already been implemented by many employers around the country to reduce occupational exposure to SARS-CoV-2 would largely prevent those serious illnesses and deaths, saving thousands of lives and preventing hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations in the next six months alone."
Despite the Government's insistence that it has "nearly unlimited authority to force private companies to be vaccine police," Siri reminded that his petitioner, along with at least 27 Attorneys General, firmly disagree. In his 20-page reply to the Government's argument, Siri illustrates its all-encompassing play on words to push its disruptive plan. Also touching on the limitless wielding of government authority if allowed to advance its expansive reading of the OSH Act, Siri's lawsuit points out:
"The Government reads 'grave danger' to mean anything that potentially injures workers, no matter whether the same danger exists outside the workplace and without respect to the degree of risk; it reads 'substances or agents' to include virtually anything; it reads 'physically harmful' as being virtually anything that could have any potential effect on a person, and it reads 'new' to mean (at least) several years. According to the Government, the term 'employees' creates no great limiting principle either: if what OSHA considers a grave danger exists at all, and can in any manner be connected to work, that is sufficient to warrant a nationwide ETS under the Government's proposed standard. The Government creates this incredibly broad standard in a quest to shoehorn into the OSH Act a federal mandate to, as the Government puts it, 'encourage' employees to receive a medical procedure that the Government believes pushes forward its public policy goals."
The lawsuit argues that if the Government can justify the current ETS targeting COVID-19, "why could it not justify the foregoing limiting sugary drink intake by employees as a means to deter heart disease, which for years has been the number one killer of Americans, including Americans in the workforce, and killed two times as many people in 2020 as did COVID-19?"
Pointing out that federally mandating vaccines is indeed not a common practice, the lawsuit highlights several fundamental flaws of the ETS, including "the idea that vaccines will reduce transmission of the COVID-19 virus." According to Siri, the government response altogether "ignores the fact that the current vaccines do not prevent transmission." Undoubtedly, as the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) made "crystal clear," with the rise of Delta and other variants, "what they [vaccines] can't do anymore is prevent transmission." Offering more data to substantiate the vaccine's inability to protect against the transmission of COVID-19, the lawsuit asserts:
"Further bringing this fact into sharp focus is the most recent official government data from Canada, which now shows that vaccinated individuals are more likely to be infected with the COVID-19 virus than unvaccinated individuals. For example, the official government data from Ontario, Canada, establishes that as of December 31, 2021, there were 80 Covid infections per 100,000 fully vaccinated individuals versus only 60 Covid infections per 100,000 unvaccinated individuals."
Screenshot / MedAlerts
Likewise, while the Government concedes in its response that natural immunity provides protection, it claims that not all individuals previously infected with COVID-19 will be immune because "it is difficult to tell, on an individual level, which individuals' have attained that level of protection."
OSHA's guidance on reporting adverse COVID-19 vaccine events is just as unclear as its observations on natural immunity. Remarkably, the lawsuit notes that OSHA guidance no longer requires employers to report adverse reactions from the COVID-19 vaccine, even when an employer requires the vaccine as a condition of employment.
Indeed, plaintiffs' attorneys contend that "to accept the government's arguments in this case is to permit the federal government to regulate Americans' diets, their medications, and their medical procedures – at least if they want to be gainfully employed." Characterizing the enormous overreach sought by Biden and the government agencies under his command, the case is aptly summarized by its opening introduction, which states:
"The Government envisions a world in which an omnipotent federal overlord has the power and authority to regulate the smallest details of everyday American life, wielding a virtually unlimited general police power, all premised on the economic activity of employment—something that, for the vast majority of Americans, is a prerequisite of providing the necessities of life for themselves and their families."
The lawsuit concludes the Court should "stay the ETS pending review, grant certiorari before judgment, or both."
