Thou shalt be inoculated or risk losing your job.

WSJ Editorial Board
How far President Biden has come from his campaign and inaugural pledges to unify the country and defeat Covid-19. On Thursday he blamed his fellow Americans and political opponents for the surge of Covid this summer, and he ordered them to be vaccinated or risk losing their jobs.

“We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us,” he declared in a deeply polarizing speech laying out his orders from the White House. Take that, unvaccinated Americans. You’re costing him. So now he’s sticking it to you.

There were some useful notes in his speech. Mr. Biden is directing the feds to surge healthcare workers, testing and monoclonal antibody treatments to hot spots. Excellent. He’s also ordering federal workers and those employed at contractors to get vaccinated. That’s his prerogative. The federal government doesn’t want its employees getting sick any more than private businesses do.

But his national mandate on business is needless overkill in a free country. He’s forcing all private employers with more than 100 workers—two-thirds of the workforce—to require vaccinations or weekly testing. The non-compliant can be dunned $14,000 per violation.

Many large businesses already require vaccinations or regular testing, and some have offered workers financial incentives to get inoculated. A few have been more forceful. Yet many businesses have been reluctant to mandate shots because they respect individual conscience or worry some employees will quit. Workers have been hard to hire amid the incentives Democrats have created not to work. Mr. Biden thinks that’s not his problem.

Employers understandably have concerns about compliance and enforcement. Are they supposed to pay for unvaccinated workers’ weekly testing, and what kind of proof of testing or vaccination must they require? Will franchisees and corporations be liable as joint employers? Nobody knows.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) Emergency Temporary Standards code allows it to enact a rule if “workers are in grave danger due to exposure to toxic substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful or to new hazards.” But Mr. Biden is stretching the government’s authority.

OSHA has typically applied this to particular industries. In June it required healthcare facilities to create plans to prevent Covid transmission, though nearly all were already doing this. It has also required employers whose employees may be exposed to Hepatitis B to pay for worker vaccinations. But OSHA has never mandated vaccinations.

Mr. Biden’s logic is also contradictory. In his speech he stressed that the vaccinated are safe from serious Covid. Yet he said the unvaccinated must protect the vaccinated. In fact, the unvaccinated are mainly a danger to themselves and their loved ones who aren’t vaccinated.

The President blamed unvaccinated Americans for clogging up “emergency rooms and intensive care units, leaving no room for someone with a heart attack, or pancreatitis, or cancer.” This is false. Some hospitals have cancelled elective surgeries, but they’ve done so to ensure that people who need urgent care can get it—whether for Covid or something else.

He also berated governors for failing to protect their own citizens and who “are keeping us from turning the corner.” He mentioned no states by name, but he referred to those that barred mask mandates in schools. He means GOP states. But states with Democratic governors like Louisiana, North Carolina and Oregon have also experienced virus surges this summer, and few of them have imposed vaccine mandates.

Vaccination rates are also no better in big cities controlled by Democrats than in GOP states. In Miami-Dade County, 79% of those eligible are fully vaccinated and 66% in Orange County (Orlando). That’s higher than in Chicago’s Cook County (63%), the Bronx (62%), Clark County around Las Vegas (54%) and Detroit’s Wayne County (53%).

Mr. Biden may be reading polls that show vaccine mandates are popular, at least among Democrats. He promised last fall to “kill the virus,” and declared victory too soon in June. He’s now trying to blame the virus surge on everyone else in angry, accusatory rhetoric.

These columns have supported the vaccine effort from the start, but we also believe in free choice and persuasion. Mr. Biden’s polarizing commands may stiffen the resistance of many on the political right, and they are certain to cost many people their jobs. They aren’t necessary, and they show again that the progressive policy default is always brute political force.

And it’s about damn time!

But Kamalalala said not to get it... 😟

Let it be noted that Brewha likes brute political force to enforce reckless and unconstitutional progressive dicktates.
He also kicks little puppies for fun.🤬

Yeah, it's the unvaccinated folks spreading it. Just like all the gays spreading AIDS.

Statistically more than half of unvaccinated Americans live in households that make less than $50,000 annually.
Whites and Asians (same thing) have above average vaccine rates.
Blacks and Latinos have below average vaccine rates.

Just putting in perspective who Biden is threatening to hurt.

You ain't black if you don't get a vaccine... 😟

Biden is clearly a racist. Ask Corn Pop.

They can test regularly without a medical or religious exception, can't they?

I just think the government starts paying people to get vaccinated. LOL[sarcasm]

I am vaccinated but I have a real problem with "OUR PATIENCE IS WEARING THIN"...................... really,has Joe forgotten who works for who?Or is he that stupid, (rhetorical we all know he is)

president Incompetent Bassard sucks... 😟

Depends on the company and what they implement. United Airlines is putting anyone with a religious objection on unpaid leave.

Federal employees or contractors do not have a testing option.

That’s why he did not get re-elected…..

Biden has the patienCE of a two year old hyperactive banjo player boy on aN EaSTer morning SUGAR JAG...

🍺

🍺

This administration doesn’t care about the 14th amendment either.

"Don't underestimate Joe's ability to f... things up."

NINE! teen

Opinion: Biden delivers straight talk — and wins kudos

WAPO OPINION
On Thursday, the Biden administration delivered some long-anticipated tough talk on behalf of America’s sane majority. It came from President Biden directly on covid-19 mandates, and from the Justice Department on constitutional order.

With final approval of the coronavirus vaccine now in his back pocket, Biden channeled the sentiments of the 70 percent or so of Americans who have gotten at least one shot. Biden declared in an address to the country, “Many of us are frustrated with the nearly 80 million Americans who are still not vaccinated, even though the vaccine is safe, effective and free.” You could almost read the thought bubble above the heads of 175 million Americans: “Darn right.”

He explained that we must deal not only with the delta variant but with “elected officials actively working to undermine the fight against covid-19.” With an eye toward Florida and Texas, where covid is surging, he lambasted leaders who “instead of encouraging people to get vaccinated and mask up [are] ordering mobile morgues for the unvaccinated dying from covid in their communities.”

Biden did not mince words about the recklessly defiant anti-vaccine crowd. “Nearly three quarters of the eligible have gotten at least one shot, but one quarter has not gotten any. That’s nearly 80 million Americans not vaccinated,” he said. “In a country as large as ours, that’s 25 percent minority. That 25 percent can cause a lot of damage — and they are.” He went on: “The unvaccinated overcrowd our hospitals, are overrunning emergency rooms and intensive care units, leaving no room for someone with a heart attack or pancreatitis or cancer.” He added that “our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us.”

Biden correctly understands that rationality does not work with most of the 25 percent of stubbornly unvaccinated Americans. While numerous enough to sustain a covid-19 surge, they are a distinct minority tormenting the rest of us and delaying our recovery. Biden’s wide-ranging vaccine mandates for employees working for the executive branch, government contractors and companies with 100 or more workers were music to the ears of the frustrated majority.
Together with his threat to sue “states undermining protection that local school officials have ordered,” he signaled an end to the era of catering to the irrational and coddling the selfish. For a country suffering from the tyranny of a minority (one determined to rewrite the history of Jan. 6, block every recovery initiative and wink at political violence), it was intensely satisfying — a confirmation that up is up and down is down.[/h]

Former Republican strategist and co-founder of the Lincoln Project Steve Schmidt put it well: “I think the overwhelming majority of the country is going to be deeply appreciative of somebody standing up at long last and saying to the small minority of nuts in this country: Enough.”

And in the category of “enough already,” Attorney General Merrick Garland announced a suit against Texas’s abortion bounty law, which seeks to deprive women of access to constitutionally protected abortions and to their right to challenge the law in court. He declared, “The obvious — and expressly acknowledged — intention of this statutory scheme is to prevent women from exercising their constitutional rights by thwarting judicial review for as long as possible.” He added:

This kind of scheme to nullify the Constitution of the United States is one that all Americans — whatever their politics or party — should fear. If it prevails, it may become a model for action in other areas, by other states, and with respect to other constitutional rights and judicial precedents.

Nor need one think long or hard to realize the damage that would be done to our society if states were allowed to implement laws that empower any private individual to infringe on another’s constitutionally protected rights in this way.
The United States has the authority and responsibility to ensure that no state can deprive individuals of their constitutional rights through a legislative scheme specifically designed to prevent the vindication of those rights.

Constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe tells me, “By emphasizing the affront to federal supremacy and the rule of law inherent in S.B. 8’s intentional blockage of women’s ability to vindicate their own rights, the complaint reaches beyond Roe v. Wade to encompass a structural attack on the basic design of the extraordinary Texas law.” In laymen’s terms: Enough is enough. Texas simply cannot do this.

In reminding the irresponsible minority of the unvaccinated and the constitutionally destructive far right (who would usher in an era of spying, harassment and coercion by outsourcing law enforcement to rabid ideologues) that they do not make the rules, the administration restored some common sense and order to our political environment. Governments can protect their people against pandemics. States cannot create their own system of vigilantes to undermine the Constitution.

Given popular revulsion at vigilante bounty hunting and widespread anger at unvaccinated spoilers, Biden probably helped himself politically, too. Sometimes good policy is good politics.