The Wall Street Journal is calling President Joe Biden’s worker vaccine mandate “overkill.”
The newspaper’s comments came in an editorial published Friday.
“COVID cases and hospitalization have blessedly plunged since the summer [d]elta surge as more Americans have been vaccinated or acquired natural immunity,” the Journal said.
“Yet the Biden Administration is still fighting the last virus war, and on Thursday rolled out its worker vaccine mandate, which will likely do more harm than good.
“The Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s ’emergency temporary standard’ requires companies with 100 or more employees to mandate that workers get vaccinated, or tested weekly and wear a face mask. Separately, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued a vaccine mandate for health-care facilities with no testing option.”
The Journal, while acknowledging vaccines have been a “pandemic godsend,” noted the mandate was imposed during a tight labor market and could force some workers to quit their jobs.
“OSHA acknowledges ‘that a vaccine mandate may result in increased employee turnover,’ though it says ‘the net effect’ will ‘be relatively small’ given the testing option,” the newspaper said. “But even if only 1% to 3% of workers leave because of the mandate, as OSHA projects, employers will struggle to replace them.
“As for the rule’s public-health justification, increases in infections among the vaccinated make singling out the unvaccinated less supportable.
And the Journal slammed the OSHA rule as a “dubious reach of federal power.”
“As 24 GOP state Attorneys General explained in a September letter to Mr. Biden, OSHA is stretching its authority under the law because ’emergency temporary standards’ are supposed to be limited to ‘grave danger from exposure to substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful or from new hazards.’”
It said the administration’s unnecessary mandate is ” rampling state police powers” and “making life harder for the unvaccinated who want to work …”
Story cited here.
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