Supreme Court blocks COVID vaccine mandate for large employers

Today the US Supreme Court, on a 6-3 vote, blocked a COVID-19 vaccine mandate that would have affected one in three American workers while leaving in place a requirement for healthcare workers.The requirement set forth late last year by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) would have required vaccines for businesses with 100 or more employees, but the Supreme Court said the mandate lacked historical precedent, and that OSHA acted too broadly in setting forth the requirement.President Joe Biden had announced the OSHA mandate in September, after a summer of underwhelming vaccination numbers."The Supreme Court's decision on the OSHA mandate is a major setback to President Biden's COVID strategy and will prolong the pandemic in the United States," said Lawrence Gostin, JD, the faculty director of the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law and Georgetown University Law Center, in a press statement."The OSHA employer mandate was the single most effective policy for getting people vaccinated.

Without a wide-reaching federal mandate, it's unlikely the national vaccination rate of just over 60% will improve. We are way behind our peer nations."The Court voted 5 to 4 to allow a vaccine mandate for workers at federally funded healthcare facilities to take effect nationwide.

That decision affects 17 million American workers.Order increased to 1 billion testsAlso today, Biden said he was buying another 500 million COVID-19 at-home tests to be distributed to Americans over the coming weeks, bringing the total of free tests to 1 billion.

Beginning next week, Americans should be able to submit an order for tests on a government website, the president said.Biden made the announcement during a briefing