Last week, we reported that a federal district court had blocked implementation of the Biden Administration’s federal contractor vaccine mandate in the states of Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee. We also pointed out that other pending legal challenges to the mandate were likely to be decided soon, and in fact this week a different federal district court has now blocked the rule nationwide.
The court’s nationwide preliminary injunction in Georgia v. Biden, No. 2:21-cv-163 (S.D. Ga. December 7, 2021), now means that all three of the Biden Administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates – the federal contractor mandate, the OSHA Emergency Temporary Standard covering employers with 100 or more employees, and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) interim final rule covering Medicare and Medicaid health care providers – have been blocked nationwide pending further legal proceedings.
The practical effect of all these developments is that covered employers, for now at least, are under no obligation to comply. At the same time, however, there is nothing in any of these court rulings that prohibits employers from implementing their own vaccine mandates or from voluntarily complying with the requirements of the mandates, as many companies have already done.
Members of the Center for Workplace Compliance (CWC) can read more here.