Current COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate Policies in the US: The OSHA Mandate and More
By Catherine Tsairis ‘25
New York City Mayor de Blasio announced that there were no “disruptions to any city services” on November 1, the day that the COVID-19 vaccine mandate for NYC municipal workers went into effect. Because they had not received a first dose of a COVID vaccine, 9,000 unvaccinated NYC municipal workers were placed on unpaid leave. Conversely, only 17 days later in Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis signed legislation to essentially ban most vaccine mandates in the state of Florida by forbidding school district vaccine mandates and mask requirements, private employer vaccine mandates, and more.
How Does This Connect to Federal Mandates?
Florida’s new legislation exists in stark contrast to previous federal vaccine mandates. In accordance with the aspirations of the Biden administration, the U.S. Department of Labor Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) announced on November 4 that companies with 100 employees or more must make sure that their workers are either fully vaccinated by January 4, or are tested weekly for COVID—effectively instituting a mandate that impacts 84 million American workers. Therefore, this new Florida ban on vaccine mandates conflicts directly with this OSHA policy. But the employment of the OSHA standard was blocked on November 6 by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, who ruled that OSHA “take no steps to implement or enforce” their mandate. OSHA later suspended their own “implementation and enforcement” of their rule on November 17, though it “remains confident in its authority to protect workers in emergencies.”
The federal government is also implementing vaccine mandates on a more focused and narrow scale. On November 22, the White House stated that 95% of U.S. federal workers are in compliance with Biden’s executive order that required COVID vaccinations in the federal workplace by November 22.
A Closer Look at the Path to Vaccine Mandates
The concept of vaccine mandates first appeared with the emergence of the smallpox vaccine. The city of Boston issued a mandate in 1827 that children enrolled in school had to receive the smallpox vaccination, essentially becoming the first city to ever institute this type of requirement. Thus, vaccine mandates have been a component of disease treatment for many years and have an intricate history.
The FDA cleared the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine and the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) in December 2020, and provided one for the Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine a few months later. Vaccinations began in earnest during the following months, with high-risk individuals and people over 75 years old being eligible for vaccination first and eventually all individuals 18 and older becoming eligible by April 2021. 57% of people 18 and older had gotten at least one vaccine dose by May 22. The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine received full FDA approval in August 2021.
Schools, cities, states, and the federal government all started to enforce their own guidelines for vaccines. To name a few, on March 25, Rutgers University was one of the first universities to require that students be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 if they wished to return to campus in the fall. On the state level, California announced on October 1 its intentions to enforce COVID-19 vaccination for children enrolled in school in order for them to be able to participate in in-person learning. California was the first state to set forth an objective of this kind. In short, there have been a multitude of vaccine mandates instituted on different levels that set forth requirements of varying degrees.
Differing Viewpoints on COVID Vaccine Mandates
Some do not agree with the use of COVID vaccine mandates on the grounds that they are unconstitutional and violate citizens’ rights. In fact, because of the aforementioned OSHA rule, at least 27 states filed lawsuits. When the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals halted the enforcement of the OSHA vaccine standard, the Attorney General of Louisiana, Jeff Landry, claimed that this suspension of the OSHA rule prevented Biden “from moving forward with this unlawful overreach. . . the president will not impose medical procedures on the American people without the checks and balances afforded by the constitution. . . Never before has the federal government tried in such a forceful way to get between the choices of an American citizen and their doctor.”
However, others support the utilization of mandates because they argue that they help to better safeguard Americans’ health. In a press briefing from the Biden administration on November 3, a senior administration official stated that the OSHA mandate would be effective because it would “lead to millions of Americans getting vaccinated, protecting workers, saving lives, strengthening our economy, and helping it to accelerate our path out of this pandemic.” Furthermore, the U.S. Department of Labor released a statement on November 4 that said that “OSHA estimates that this rule will save thousands of lives and prevent more than 250,000 hospitalizations due to workplace exposure to COVID-19 over the course of the ETS.”
What Are the Future Implications?
It is not just Florida that has enacted legislation to counteract vaccine mandates. Other states, including Tennessee and Montana, have already instituted similar legislation. Furthermore, as a reaction to OSHA’s recent policies, Florida passed a bill on November 17 that could allow Florida to leave OSHA and form its own workplace safety agency. Even though no other state has attempted this for 40 years, multiple other states could follow Florida’s lead, leading to an exodus of states from the federal agency over the coming years.
Essentially, the intense debate over the OSHA rule is a prime example of the struggle between the state and federal governments and what their respective powers entail. The Biden administration believes that the OSHA policy’s “safety rules pre-empt state laws,” so therefore they feel that the OSHA rule will “withstand legal challenges.” On November 16, a lottery selected the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to look further into the case. However, there was a very real possibility that the controversy over the OSHA mandate could go all the way to the Supreme Court. This Supreme Court case could raise important questions: Who has the right to impose vaccine mandates? Are the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens being upheld?
Ultimately, the OSHA mandate controversy did make it to the Supreme Court. On January 13, the Supreme Court released their rulings, which prevented the OSHA rule from being imposed on “large private companies.” However, the Supreme Court permitted a vaccine mandate for medical organizations that accept Medicaid or Medicare payments. The Supreme Court made it clear in an unsigned opinion that OSHA has not been given “‘the power to regulate public health more broadly,’” describing that the OSHA vaccine mandate “‘certainly falls’” in this category. In the end, the dispute between the state governments and federal government over vaccine mandates had long-lasting ramifications, leading all the way to a Supreme Court case. By classifying the mandate as an overstep in OSHA’s authority, the Supreme Court has set an entirely new precedent for the enforcement of vaccine mandates.