Court suspends OSHA from enforcing rule…for now, but media hasn’t reported it

Excerpts written by Jeffrey Tucker and the Children’s Health Defense

The news blackout has reached crisis levels. OSHA, the division of the Department of Labor tasked with enforcing Biden’s vaccine mandate, has just been forced to back down from its draconian and tremendously evil mandate on private businesses. This has freed some 80 million from the requirement that they get the jab.

The case against the Biden administration was brought by a variety of entities, ranging from state attorneys general (including Texas, Mississippi and Utah), American Family Association and multiple businesses and individuals.

OSHA seems to have obeyed the courts, which is rather amazing because this defies even the Biden administration, which very clearly said that OSHA should go ahead, despite what the court said.

Not one news media outlet is reporting it – it’s been 5 days. I had to find out from New York Times reporter Alex Bereson, (whose Twitter account was suspended previously for ‘disinformation’). Even then, I didn’t believe it until I looked for myself at the OSHA website. It says the following.

On November 12, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit granted a motion to stay OSHA’s COVID-19 Vaccination and Testing Emergency Temporary Standard, published on November 5, 2021 (86 Fed. Reg. 61402) (“ETS”). The court ordered that OSHA “take no steps to implement or enforce” the ETS “until further court order.” While OSHA remains confident in its authority to protect workers in emergencies, OSHA has suspended activities related to the implementation and enforcement of the ETS pending future developments in the litigation.

-OSHA

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) on Tuesday suspended implementation and enforcement of its Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) on mandatory COVID vaccination and testing in the workplace.

Under the ETS, employers with more than 100 employees were given until Jan. 4 to comply with President Biden’s COVID vaccine mandate.

However, a Nov. 12 ruling by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals barred OSHA from enforcing the ETS “pending adequate judicial review” of a motion for permanent injunction.

OSHA’s latest action does not affect a separate directive from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services requiring employees of medical facilities to be vaccinated by Dec. 6.

As for the Media

If OSHA repeals the implementation and enforcement of a major measure and no one knows about it, has it really happened? We are about to find out. HR departments all over the country have already started enforcing this. What they are doing is actually illegal! It should stop immediately. But it will not stop so long as this tremendous reversal is not reported. These companies will likely proceed along their merry way to violate the rights of their workers, believing that they are complying.

Ray Flores, Children’s Health Defense legal counsel. “…I have not seen this news trickle down to employers, who to my knowledge have not issued widespread pauses on company mandates.”

Did you get a chance to look at the 5th circuit court opinion? It was amazingly good:

“On the dubious assumption that the Mandate does pass constitutional muster—which we need not decide today—it is nonetheless fatally flawed on its own terms. Indeed, the Mandate’s strained prescriptions combine to make it the rare government pronouncement that is both overinclusive (applying to employers and employees in virtually all industries and workplaces in America, with little attempt to account for the obvious differences between the risks facing, say, a security guard on a lonely night shift, and a meatpacker working shoulder to shoulder in a cramped warehouse) and underinclusive (purporting to save employees with 99 or more coworkers from a “grave danger” in the workplace, while making no attempt to shield employees with 98 or fewer coworkers from the very same threat). The Mandate’s stated impetus—a purported “emergency” that the entire globe has now endured for nearly two years, and which OSHA itself spent nearly two months responding to—is unavailing as well. And its promulgation grossly exceeds OSHA’s statutory authority.”

Magnificent! But there’s more.

“Here, OSHA’s attempt to shoehorn an airborne virus that is both widely present in society (and thus not particular to any workplace) and non-life- threatening to a vast majority of employees into a neighboring phrase connoting toxicity and poisonousness is yet another transparent stretch.”

And more:

“The Mandate is staggeringly overbroad. Applying to 2 out of 3 private-sector employees in America, in workplaces as diverse as the country itself, the Mandate fails to consider what is perhaps the most salient fact of all: the ongoing threat of COVID-19 is more dangerous to some employees than to other employees.”

Finally:

“It is clear that a denial of the petitioners’ proposed stay would do them irreparable harm. For one, the Mandate threatens to substantially burden the liberty interests of reluctant individual recipients put to a choice between their job(s) and their jab(s).”

In conclusion:

“From economic uncertainty to workplace strife, the mere specter of the Mandate has contributed to untold economic upheaval in recent months. Of course, the principles at stake when it comes to the Mandate are not reducible to dollars and cents. The public interest is also served by maintaining our constitutional structure and maintaining the liberty of individuals to make intensely personal decisions according to their own convictions—even, or perhaps particularly, when those decisions frustrate government officials.”

Many people in Congress tell me that all the studies concerning natural immunity simply could no longer be ignored.

What Happens Next

Despite every reason for optimism here, we are far from being out of the woods.

As The Defender reported Tuesday, there are dozens of lawsuits making their way through the courts challenging the mandates on behalf of teachers, healthcare workers, police, firefighters and more.

A federal judicial panel on Tuesday assigned at least 34 of those lawsuits — including the one in the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals that resulted in OSHA suspending its ETS — to an appeals court in Cincinnati, The New York Times reported.

According to the Times:

“A court clerk for the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation randomly selected the Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit by drawing from a drum containing entries for the twelve regional courts of appeal, each of which has at least one related case pending. The procedure can be used to consolidate cases that are all raising the same issue.

“While simplifying the legal dispute, the step also had the effect of removing the matter from the Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans. This month, a three-judge panel there had blocked the government from moving forward with the rule — declaring that it “grossly exceeds” the authority of the occupational safety agency that issued it.”

According to Reuters, OSHA has issued 10 emergency standards in its 50-year history. Of the six challenged in court, only one survived intact.

It’s all a mess, but plenty of time to think about that. For now, let’s do two things: celebrate that OSHA has backed down and blast the media for failing even to report this.

We live in deeply unstable and terrifying times. But this development reveals that it is possible to prevail against all odds.