The Supremes hand freedom lovers a rare win
Federalism and separation of powers are not relegated to the dustbin of history just yet
The Biden Administration issued a nonsensical and particularly heavy handed regulation last September. Despite the fact that both those vaccinated against Covid-19 and those un-vaccinated contract the disease and spread it, the so-called OSHA mandate would have required only the unvaccinated to undergo weekly testing if they exercised their right to refuse injection with the experimental gene-based immune therapies earning billions of dollars for Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson. Today the US Supreme Court struck the mandate a fatal blow.
The mandate would have forced all businesses with 100 or more employees to develop a Covid-19 policy and to require vaccination or weekly testing of its workforce. Enforcement of the mandate had been blocked by a federal court late last year, only to have the stay lifted by another federal court.
All regulations issued by the executive branch of the federal government must be based on a valid federal law passed by Congress granting the issuing agency the authority to write the rules. In this case, the Biden Administration sought to impose the mandate by ordering the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to treat Covid as an workplace health and safety hazard to be addressed by that agency. The problem with that, according to the Court, was that Congress had never authorized OSHA to impose such sweeping requirements as vaccination of 80 million plus people to fight an illness that afflicts people in their general interactions everywhere, not just in the workplace. It was clear, the court found, that the Administration was using the concept of workplace safety as a pretext to impose a broad-based health measure that it didn’t otherwise have the authority to impose on the public. That authority rests with states and localities. It might also rest with Congress under certain circumstances, but Congress didn’t authorize this. In fact, in a vote in the Senate recently, a majority in that body expressed their opposition to it.
The Biden Administration had basically admitted that what they were doing was using workplace safety as a pretext whenever they were questioned about the mandates. It was a punitive measure intended to make life harder for individuals who refused to do what they were told to do by the federal government. No one objectively looking at the current state of the science can legitimately say that this measure was about stopping the spread of the disease. Vaccinated and “boosted” individuals are contracting and spreading Covid every day. If you believe some of the data, such as that recently coming out of Denmark, boosted individuals may be even more likely to contract and spread the virus, plunging into “negative efficacy” against the omicron strain in as little as 30 to 60 days after injection.
That’s not to say that the vaccines don’t play a role in reducing the severity of Covid symptoms for some people, at least for a limited period of time after the fast-waning immunity they generate first kicks in. For younger, healthier people, whose risk of serious complications from Covid are very low even without vaccines, the issue of whether the vaccines are safe in the long term becomes an important consideration as well, though. For that, no data exists despite the fact that billions have now been injected with these experimental therapies. “We’ve got to inject it to see if it’s safe,” they might retort. But all of that is a totally separate issue from infection and spread, which the mandates were ostensibly intended to address.
As the previous year has played out, it’s become more and more evident that the novel gene-based immune therapies (those using both mRNA and DNA technology), rushed through development and testing and declared safe based on no long-term data whatsoever, are failures. They don’t prevent infection. They don’t prevent transmission. They might even make it more likely that you contract omicron. The best they can say for themselves is that they may reduce the likelihood of serious illness or death for the one category of the public that are at significant risk from Covid — the very old and the already very sick. But they only do that for a very short period of time. Natural immunity is stronger and better and, because of the lack of long-term vaccine safety data and the reports hundreds of thousands of vaccine adverse events, natural immunity is a far better option for the vast majority of the public who aren’t at serious risk from the virus. For those who are at serious risk, the vaccines are available if they want them.
Today’s decision was a win for freedom and bodily autonomy. As Justices Gorsuch, Thomas, and Alito said in a concurring opinion to today’s ruling, the question is not whether the vaccines are good or bad or somewhere in between. When it comes to whether you as an individual are going to inject a substance into your body, the question is: who decides? According to all but the most liberal justices, today’s answer was: not Joe Biden.
Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.