The Supreme Court of the United States announced today its decision to stop the Biden administration from enforcing its COVID-19 vaccine mandate for businesses with 100 or more employees.
The court’s conservative majority concluded that the administration overstepped its authority by seeking to impose the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) vaccine-or-test rule. However, it allowed the administration to proceed with a vaccine mandate for most health care workers in the United States.
The mandate would have required companies with 100 or more employees to ensure their workforce was fully vaccinated against COVID-19 or have unvaccinated workers produce weekly negative test results. Organizations that failed to comply could have faced penalties of nearly $14,000 per violation.
OSHA would have also required businesses to provide paid time off for employees to get vaccines and sick leave to recover from side effects that prevent them from working. Overall, the requirements would have applied to over 84 million workers across the country.
President Joe Biden first ordered sweeping federal vaccine requirements in order to rein in the then-surging delta variant and to curb vaccine resistance across the country. Today’s announcement comes as the highly-contagious omicron variant continues to sweep across the globe.
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