Supreme Court halts COVID-19 vaccine rule for US businesses

[Finance85]

It sounds like you're saying that a vaccine mandate would be OK if we were facing a more deadly variant that the vaccines do a good job against.

Is that a reasonable take?

I think most of us would reject a vaccine mandate to address a relatively minor disease. Or a vaccine mandate to take a relatively ineffective vaccine.

I got vaccinated as soon as I was eligible, based on my belief in what I was being told re: efficacy and safety. I knew that efficacy wasn't 100%. I was told, however, it was around 95%, and there were very few side effects. Turns out efficacy decreases dramatically over a relatively short period, and that side effects for the Pfizer version are much higher than the FDA and CDC would lead us to believe. The mRNA vaccines work differently than traditional vaccines.

Add in the demographics around who is actually dying, and if my being vaccinated really does protect others instead of just me, and you are correct in my waning trust of the vaccine, much less mandates.

Trad's post is close to my position, though not necessarily stated the way I would. I'm not against vaccines, or even mandates, if the circumstances warrant them. If a vaccine is created that works as traditional vaccines work (lasting immunity), and is safe, and is needed to protect everyone, that potentially justifies mandates. Even then, I'd prefer it be at the state level rather than the federal level, though I understand the argument for federal mandates.

I guess I'm different than most here. I'm willing to change my opinion as data comes out. It's a lot easier to not get too invested in a position. I don't have to double down on as much stupid stuff. The cloth masks work crowd is undoubtedly feeling betrayed by the CDC this week.

 

[Rifler]

Could you please point out where in the OSH Act it says that a hazard must be specific to the workplace in order to be considered an occupational hazard?

Well for starters, the "O" in OSHA stands for occupational...

 

[Joes Place]

Well for starters, the "O" in OSHA stands for occupational...

That wasn't the question.

And there is neither "precedent" nor "statute" which allows any court interpretation to assert a hazard cannot exist BOTH within AND outside the workplace, for OSHA to regulate the workplace on the basis of that hazard.

 

[The Tradition]

That wasn't the question.

And there is neither "precedent" nor "statute" which allows any court interpretation to assert a hazard cannot exist BOTH within AND outside the workplace, for OSHA to regulate the workplace on the basis of that hazard.

But this particular regulation doesn't end at the shop door. Surely you can't be this dense.

 

[Rifler]

That wasn't the question.

And there is neither "precedent" nor "statute" which allows any court interpretation to assert a hazard cannot exist BOTH within AND outside the workplace, for OSHA to regulate the workplace on the basis of that hazard.

And that's not at all the point,.. That argument was merely one of many that the court adopted to support their position,.. Come back to me when OSHA chooses to address climate change,.. And by the way, this was the Supreme Court,.. they establish precedent.

 

[Joes Place]

That argument was merely one of many that the court adopted to support their position

And you can now understand that point is completely inadequate.

Along with the dozens of citations from rightwing media sites asserting Covid is "just a cold", etc etc etc.

 

[Whiskeydeltadeltatango]

But this particular regulation doesn't end at the shop door. Surely you can't be this dense.

You ain't seen nothin yet.

 

[Whiskeydeltadeltatango]

And you can now understand that point is completely inadequate.

Along with the dozens of citations from rightwing media sites asserting Covid is "just a cold", etc etc etc.

You butthurt his forced jab didn't go through or what?

 

[IAHawk2011]

But this particular regulation doesn't end at the shop door. Surely you can't be this dense.

So what? It doesn’t matter. The OSH Act does not require that any effect of the emergency standard “ends at the shop door.”

Where I come from, when a court invents extra limitations that do not have statutory, legal or precedential support, we call that judicial activism.

 

[Finance85]

That wasn't the question.

And there is neither "precedent" nor "statute" which allows any court interpretation to assert a hazard cannot exist BOTH within AND outside the workplace, for OSHA to regulate the workplace on the basis of that hazard.

As the Court pointed out, there's no precedent or statute that allows OSHA to create a regulation that affects people outside the workplace.

 

[IAHawk2011]

As the Court pointed out, there's no precedent or statute that allows OSHA to create a regulation that affects people outside the workplace.

The text of the statute is very clear. It allows OSHA to promulgate an emergency standard (1) if employees are exposed to grave danger from physically harmful agents and (2) if that standard is necessary to protect employees from such danger.

It doesn’t say anything about the shit you keep parroting from the majority opinion. All of that stuff is extraneous window dressing that you are reading into the statute in order to get to your desired end result.

 

[The Tradition]

The text of the statute is very clear. It allows OSHA to promulgate an emergency standard (1) if employees are exposed to grave danger from physically harmful agents and (2) if that standard is necessary to protect employees from such danger.

It doesn’t say anything about the shit you keep parroting from the majority opinion. All of that stuff is extraneous window dressing that you are reading into the statute in order to get to your desired end result.

For 99.9 percent of working age people, it's not a grave danger.

 

[IAHawk2011]

For 99.9 percent of working age people, it's not a grave danger.

Perhaps. Unfortunately, the majority did not engage in any textual analysis of the statute at issue, presumably because they did not want to make the argument you are making - that a virus that has killed over 800,000 people and hospitalized millions does not constitute a “grave danger.”

 

[What Would Jesus Do?]

Interesting article from a statutory interpretation and administrative law professor at Georgetown Law. Some pretty sharp criticism for Gorsuch, noting that the arguments in his concurrence lack any textual basis (which is a bit of a problem for a Justice who considers himself a textualist). In fact, many of his arguments take positions that are traditionally opposed by textualists. She concludes the article by noting

“I am not cynical by nature and typically resist partisan, cynical readings of the Court’s statutory cases, but it is hard to view this case as anything other than a sign that at least in high-stakes political cases, the conservative Justices on the modern Roberts Court no longer feel the need to follow a textualist or formalist approach to statutory interpretation even as a pretext to justify reaching their preferred interpretive outcomes.”

Some Brief Thoughts on Gorsuch’s Opinion in NFIB v. OSHA | Election Law Blog

electionlawblog.org

Very interesting. Thanks.

Lots to like in this article. This jumped out at me:

Justice Gorsuch then cites a 2021 Senate resolution disapproving the regulation at issue, a form of subsequent legislative history, or “statutory history” as I and others have called it, that is in fundamental tension with textualism’s theoretical critique of legislative history. (Problems, from a textualist point of view, with reliance on the Senate resolution include that it was adopted by only one chamber of Congress and was not signed into law by the President—thereby failing to meet the bicameralism and presentment requirements articulated in Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution.)​