Is President Joe Biden following the science? If the White House prevails in court, you’ll soon need a COVID-19 vaccine to keep your job at any company with more than 100 employees. Yet you don’t need a vaccine to fly with more than 100 strangers.
Effective January, unless you work only at home, a Biden-ordered Occupational Safety and Health Administration directive requires you to get a vaccine or a weekly test — or be fired from your job. The White House’s reasoning is that “unvaccinated workers face grave danger.”
Further, the federal government says it has the mandate authority as a longtime regulator of workplace safety.
Finally: The White House says it is not putting an undue burden on large employers, who “have the administrative capacity to implement the standard’s requirements promptly.”
Do these arguments make sense?
An appeals court doesn’t think so.
This month, it suspended the mandate. The judges ruled that it is “the rare government pronouncement that is both overinclusive,” applying to workers in “virtually all industries,” and underinclusive, ignoring the fact that workers at smaller companies are in the same “grave danger.”
But the White House doesn’t think the mandate makes sense, either.
That is, not when the same reasoning is applied to another sphere of communal stranger-on-stranger activity: air travel.
Over Thanksgiving, Americans flew to visit friends and family in numbers close to pre-COVID travel, with 2.3 million people flying on Wednesday.