Biden’s Vaccine Command Thou shalt be inoculated or risk losing your job.
How far President Biden has come from his campaign and inaugural pledges to unify the country and defeat Covid-19. On Thursday he blamed his fellow Americans and political opponents for the surge of Covid this summer, and he ordered them to be vaccinated or risk losing their jobs.
“We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us,” he declared in a deeply polarizing speech laying out his orders from the White House. Take that, unvaccinated Americans. You’re costing him. So now he’s sticking it to you.
There were some useful notes in his speech. Mr. Biden is directing the feds to surge healthcare workers, testing and monoclonal antibody treatments to hot spots. Excellent. He’s also ordering federal workers and those employed at contractors to get vaccinated. That’s his prerogative. The federal government doesn’t want its employees getting sick any more than private businesses do.
But his national mandate on business is needless overkill in a free country. He’s forcing all private employers with more than 100 workers—two-thirds of the workforce—to require vaccinations or weekly testing. The non-compliant can be dunned $14,000 per violation.
Many large businesses already require vaccinations or regular testing, and some have offered workers financial incentives to get inoculated. A few have been more forceful. Yet many businesses have been reluctant to mandate shots because they respect individual conscience or worry some employees will quit. Workers have been hard to hire amid the incentives Democrats have created not to work. Mr. Biden thinks that’s not his problem.
Employers understandably have concerns about compliance and enforcement. Are they supposed to pay for unvaccinated workers’ weekly testing, and what kind of proof of testing or vaccination must they require? Will franchisees and corporations be liable as joint employers? Nobody knows.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) Emergency Temporary Standards code allows it to enact a rule if “workers are in grave danger due to exposure to toxic substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful or to new hazards.” But Mr. Biden is stretching the government’s authority.
OSHA has typically applied this to particular industries. In June it required healthcare facilities to create plans to prevent Covid transmission, though nearly all were already doing this. It has also required employers whose employees may be exposed to Hepatitis B to pay for worker vaccinations. But OSHA has never mandated vaccinations.
Mr. Biden’s logic is also contradictory. In his speech he stressed that the vaccinated are safe from serious Covid. Yet he said the unvaccinated must protect the vaccinated. In fact, the unvaccinated are mainly a danger to themselves and their loved ones who aren’t vaccinated.
The President blamed unvaccinated Americans for clogging up “emergency rooms and intensive care units, leaving no room for someone with a heart attack, or pancreatitis, or cancer.” This is false. Some hospitals have cancelled elective surgeries, but they’ve done so to ensure that people who need urgent care can get it—whether for Covid or something else.
He also berated governors for failing to protect their own citizens and who “are keeping us from turning the corner.” He mentioned no states by name, but he referred to those that barred mask mandates in schools. He means GOP states. But states with Democratic governors like Louisiana, North Carolina and Oregon have also experienced virus surges this summer, and few of them have imposed vaccine mandates.
Vaccination rates are also no better in big cities controlled by Democrats than in GOP states. In Miami-Dade County, 79% of those eligible are fully vaccinated and 66% in Orange County (Orlando). That’s higher than in Chicago’s Cook County (63%), the Bronx (62%), Clark County around Las Vegas (54%) and Detroit’s Wayne County (53%).
Mr. Biden may be reading polls that show vaccine mandates are popular, at least among Democrats. He promised last fall to “kill the virus,” and declared victory too soon in June. He’s now trying to blame the virus surge on everyone else in angry, accusatory rhetoric.
These columns have supported the vaccine effort from the start, but we also believe in free choice and persuasion. Mr. Biden’s polarizing commands may stiffen the resistance of many on the political right, and they are certain to cost many people their jobs. They aren’t necessary, and they show again that the progressive policy default is always brute political force.
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