President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for private employers finally landed Thursday, just short of two months after he announced it. Policy-wise, it’s wrong. Legally, it’s suspect. Politically, it will wind up pleasing no one.
COVID is clearly in retreat across America, with deaths and hospitalizations dropping even as new, highly effective treatments keep coming on line, from monoclonal antibodies to Merck’s molnupiravir to Pfizer’s Paxlovid. Whatever urgency the nation saw back in September has faded.
And Biden’s order won’t take effect before Jan. 4, when the crisis will be even farther in the past.
Most US adults are now vaccinated; many of the rest have immunity from having been infected. You can make a public-safety argument for requiring jabs of teachers, cops and other public employees.
But not for forcing most private companies to require their workers to get jabbed.
Businesses should encourage employees to get the shot, and a few may see reason to voluntarily impose a mandate. But there’s simply no good excuse for the feds trying to force a “vax or no job” rule.
Indeed, the White House (after long saying it couldn’t mandate vaccines nationwide) had to go through the Occupational Safety & Health Administration to even attempt to make this order legal: It’s justified as an emergency “workplace safety” measure — except that vaccination has nothing to do with the workplace.
If you’ve had your shots, you’re quite safe. If you haven’t, you face added risk because of your decision wherever you go, not just on the job. And, with the latest science suggesting that vaccinated people spread Delta about as much as the unvaxxed do, the jabless aren’t even putting their coworkers at any added risk.
Lawsuits are landing by the dozens against the regulation for lots of reasons. Another: OSHA hasn’t even tried to issue an emergency reg in decades, because the courts kept throwing them out. The agency doesn’t have the authority without making a strong, public case for a rule over a period of years.
The whole thing was a gimmick from the start, as the White House tried to make it look like Biden was showing leadership in the wake of the Afghan-bugout disaster. His aides didn’t care that the mandate was wrong, unnecessary and illegal: They just wanted to change the subject.
We look forward to the day when the nation’s president again focuses on actually leading, and less on cynically pretending to.