White House chief of staff Ron Klain said on Sunday that he was “quite confident” that a vaccine or COVID-19 test mandate for businesses would be upheld in the courts.
“I'm quite confident that when this finally gets fully adjudicated, not just a temporary order, the validity of this requirement will be upheld. It's common sense, Chuck, if OSHA can tell people to wear a hard hat on the job, to be careful around chemicals, it can put in place these simple measures to keep our workers safe,” Klain told “Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd on NBC News.
At least 26 states are filing legal challenges against a mandate developed by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) that requires businesses with at least 100 workers to either get vaccinated or adopt a policy that requires employees undergo weekly COVID-19 testing and wear face masks in lieu of the vaccination.
States have either argued that the vaccine-or-test mandate is unconstitutional or that OSHA has not been authorized to put in place sweeping public health regulations.
“OSHA’s vaccination mandate represents a real threat to individual liberty,” West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey said in a statement last week, whose state filed a lawsuit along with Kentucky, Idaho, Kansas, Ohio, Oklahoma and Tennessee.
“As we have seen throughout the country, it is also a public policy disaster that displaces vulnerable workers and exacerbates a nationwide shortage of front-line workers, with severe consequences for all Americans,” Morrisey added.
In a win for one coalition of states, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued a stay on the vaccine-or-test mandate on Saturday, temporarily stopping the federal requirement. The affected states include Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Utah and South Carolina.
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