A top official at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said that businesses should not count on a court-imposed pause on President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate and should continue implementing the directive.
Marc Freedman, the Chamber’s vice president of employment policy, told CNBC on Monday that companies should still consider the Emergency Temporary Standard issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration as binding.
“Ultimately the courts are going to decide, but employers still need to take this as a live ETS until it is definitively shut down,” said Freedman in a statement . “They should not bank on the preliminary actions of the 5th Circuit.”
TRUCKERS WARN ‘DISASTROUS’ MANDATE WILL WORSEN SUPPLY CHAIN CHAOS
In September, Biden announced that businesses with more than 100 employees must institute a COVID-19 vaccine mandate, although they have the option to provide weekly testing results in lieu of inoculation. The compliance date was Jan. 4. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, under complaints from several states, recently moved to block the order.
The court reaffirmed its pause in a 22-page ruling released on Friday.
“The Mandate is a one-size-fits-all sledgehammer that makes hardly any attempt to account for differences in workplaces (and workers) that have more than a little bearing on workers’ varying degrees of susceptibility to the supposedly ‘grave danger’ the Mandate purports to address,” the ruling said.
Despite the pause, the White House has said that the Biden administration is confident the mandate will hold up in court.
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The National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors recently warned the White House that jobs would be lost and the country’s supply chain further imperiled if the vaccine mandate is implemented as ordered.
“NAW urges that the Executive Order’s implementation be revised to avoid this calamity and provide alternatives to promote safety, including testing, and consider a short-term delay to provide time to carry out these changes and to avoid further supply chain disruptions in the coming months,” Eric Hoplin, president and CEO of the NAW, wrote in a letter to the president.
