An Ohio public policy think tank said Wednesday that it is seeking to get to the bottom of how the White House decided to implement its federal COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
“The Buckeye Institute filed a motion with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit on behalf of its clients, Phillips Manufacturing & Tower Company and Sixarp LLC, demanding that the White House produce all communications and records regarding the initiation and development of President Biden’s vaccine mandate,” according to a press release from the group.
Tuesday, a federal judge issued an injunction halting the Biden administration’s controversial vaccine mandate, which applied to all companies with more than 100 employees.
Now, The Buckeye Institute wants to know exactly how the mandate was devised in the first place.
“The White House must include ALL communications related to its justification for the OSHA vaccine mandate in the record—as opposed to providing only the pretextual justification that OSHA manufactured in anticipation of this legal case,” said Robert Alt, president and chief executive officer of the Buckeye Institute.
The motion argues that the Biden administration admitted that it put the rule into place, not for the safety of workers, but to increase vaccination rates among the general public.
With that motive, the motion argues, implementing the mandate falls outside the scope of OSHA’s authority, and should render the mandate unenforceable.
“As the State coalition extensively documents … the Administration itself has admitted that the worker protection rationale—the purported sole basis of OSHA’s Vaccine Mandate—is pretextual,” the motion says. “Indeed, the Administration itself has admitted not only that the true purpose is achieving full vaccination, but also that reliance on the OSH Act is a ‘work-around’ to pursue the Administration’s goal of achieving full vaccination in society at large.”
The motion continues:
These rationales are completely missing from the Vaccine Mandate’s statement of reasons. It nowhere mentions the goal of increasing public, societal vaccination rates. Instead, contrary to all public statements by the White House, it attempts to reimagine this goal as an occupational safety statute. OSHA’s justification based on workplace safety is thus clearly contrived to further the President’s overall individual vaccination rate goal.
For now, Biden’s vaccine mandate is on hold, but the point may be moot.
After the mandate was announced, many large companies – especially in the healthcare sector – gave their employees until early October to get vaccinated or be terminated. Thus, those employees were forced to take the vaccine well before the federal court’s Tuesday injunction.
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Pete D’Abrosca is a contributor at The Ohio Star and The Star News Network. Follow Pete on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “COVID- 19 Vaccine” by Marco Verch Professional Photographer. CC BY 2.0.
Glad that the Buckeye Institute is stepping up to the plate here. None of these “mitigating” restrictions have been shown to save lives, and now no-one even bothers to talk about slowing the spread, which was the first excuse for essentially imprisoning people in their homes. None have worked as advertised, but that hasn’t mattered apparently, as the same failed policies keep getting extended or re-imposed. Science? Give me a break!