The Supreme Court declined to block different kinds of Covid-19 vaccine mandates across America which might jeopardize the plan of President Joe Biden to curtail the coronavirus pandemic.
The Supreme Court is further considering whether to allow the Biden administration to let millions of American citizens get themselves completely vaccinated or not.
“This isn’t really a case about emergency public health powers or even vaccination law, so much as it’s a case about how much flexibility do administrative agencies have to respond to a problem or a threat without waiting for specific authorization from Congress,” said Lindsay Wiley, a health law professor at American University’s Washington School of Law.
So far the Biden administration is finding it hard to defend the federal vaccine rules which have been overly challenged in court.
Three major mandates of President Joe Biden have attracted quite a lot of court rulings against them. They are “the health care worker vaccine requirement for more than 10 million people, the rules for companies with more than 100 employees and the mandate on some federal contractors.”
“There are different issues raised when the entity that is doing the mandating is federal, and not a state actor,” said Zack Buck, a University of Tennessee College of Law professor who specializes in health law. “That goes all the way back to the founding of the country — the police power that’s retained by the states. What kind of authority does the federal government have? What kind of authority do federal agencies have? And does that matter to the Supreme Court? I think the answer is, it might.”
“To suggest otherwise would mean that Congress had to have anticipated both the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic and the unprecedented politicization of the disease to regulate vaccination against,” the 11th Circuit said.
The 11th circuit is the one that is pushing back the vaccine mandate on the basis of logic. It has an opinion that “Congress did not need to be so specific when it tasked HHS with regulating for the health and safety of Medicare and Medicaid recipients.”
