Biden Administration Agrees to Pause COVID Shot Mandate for Healthcare Workers

The Biden administration’s Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced Thursday it will temporary halt enforcement of its mandate that healthcare workers be vaccinated for COVID-19, pending appeal of a federal injunction blocking the measure.

On September 9, President Joe Biden announced a series of vaccine mandates for the public and private sectors alike, including one with no testing option for around 17 million healthcare workers at medical facilities that receive Medicare and Medicaid funding.

22 states are currently suing the administration over the move, across two different joint suits.

BREAKING: CMS recently issued a memo suspending enforcement of their vaccine mandate on health care workers following our win in court halting the mandate on Monday. pic.twitter.com/jQ2i9nUiO2

— Attorney General Eric Schmitt (@AGEricSchmitt) December 2, 2021

“On November 29 and November 30, 2021, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri and United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana issued preliminary injunctions against the implementation and enforcement of the Interim Final Rule against Medicare-and-Medicaid-certified providers and suppliers,” acknowledges the memo by CMS, an arm of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS). “Between the two of them, these injunctions cover all states, the District of Columbia and the U.S. Territories.”

“While CMS remains confident in its authority to protect the health and safety of patients in facilities certified by the Medicare and Medicaid programs, it has suspended activities related to the implementation and enforcement of this rule pending future developments in the litigation,” the memo continued. “Accordingly, while these preliminary injunctions are in effect, surveyors must not survey providers for compliance with the requirements of the Interim Final Rule.”

The Daily Wire reports that U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty’s ruling declared that “if the separation of powers meant anything to the Constitutional framers, it meant that the three necessary ingredients to deprive a person of liberty or property — the power to make rules, to enforce them, and to judge their violations — could never fall into the same hands,” and that “that civil liberties face grave risks when governments proclaim indefinite states of emergency” such as the COVID pandemic.

Critically, the Louisiana suit cites language from another recent ruling of the Fifth Circuit that temporarily blocked the administration’s other vaccine (or weekly testing) mandate for any business with 100 workers or more. The Fifth Circuit will hear this case as well if Doughty’s ruling is appealed, suggesting the ruling is likely to be upheld, at least until it reaches the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, a body of data suggests that the mass vaccination strategy for defeating COVID-19 has failed, undermining the case for the Biden vaccine mandate that is currently held up in litigation. The federal government considers more than 197 million Americans (59% of the eligible) to be “fully vaccinated” (a moving target given the vaccines’ temporary nature), yet data from Johns Hopkins University reported in October shows that more Americans died of COVID-19 this year (353,000) than in all of 2020 (352,000).

Vaccine hesitancy persists thanks to unaddressed concerns about the vaccines’ safety, stemming largely from the fact that they were developed and released far faster than any previous vaccine.

Defenders stress that their development did not start from scratch, but rather relied on years of prior research into mRNA technology; and that one of the innovations of Operation Warp Speed was conducting various aspects of the development process concurrently rather than sequentially, eliminating delays unrelated to safety. However, those factors do not fully account for the condensing of clinical trial phases — each of which can take anywhere from 1–3 years on their own — to just three months apiece.

While cases of severe harm reported to the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) after taking COVID shots do not establish causation and represent less than one percent of total doses administered in the United States, a 2010 report submitted to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services’ (HHS) Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) warned that VAERS caught “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events.” May reporting from NBC News quotes several mainstream experts acknowledging “gaps” in federal vaccine monitoring.

Additionally, many of the unvaccinated simply consider it unnecessary in light of significant evidence that immunity from prior COVID infection lasts longer and is more durable than immunity from vaccination, while religious and/or pro-life Americans harbor moral objections to taking something developed and/or tested with the use of fetal cells from aborted babies.

While the vaccine mandates continue to be litigated, the Biden administration is also technically complying with the injunction against the worker mandate, while asking businesses to voluntarily implement it anyway.

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