On Wednesday, a federal appeals court ordered the revival of the COVID vaccine mandate issued by President Joe Biden for healthcare employees who work at federally-funded facilities.
Three judges on the panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans that the lower court had the power to block the vaccine mandate in just the 14 states that filed a lawsuit. The judges also ruled that it was wrong to impose a nationwide injunction on President Biden's vaccine mandate.
According to Reuters, this ruling was a "rare win for Biden's pandemic strategy," which vaccine mandates have faced several lawsuits to date. The Biden administration's COVID vaccine mandate required healthcare workers from federally-funded facilities to get the COVID shot or lose financial support from the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which provides two large government healthcare programs.
President Biden's vaccine mandate affected two million unvaccinated healthcare workers, who needed to be vaccinated by December 6. However, the mandate was blocked before the deadline and remains temporarily blocked in 24 states. These 24 states include the 14 states that filed a lawsuit which was reviewed by the 5th Circuit and 10 more states in which the mandate was blocked by a federal judge in St. Louis in a November 29 ruling.
The 14 states that filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration over it's overreaching vaccine mandate are Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah and West Virginia. Meanwhile, the Biden administration claimed that the vaccine mandate will save lives in the midst of the expected winter spike of COVID cases.
The 5th Circuit ruling however, decided that the Biden administration failed to present a strong case, that they have the authority to impose the rule, that they would need to prove in the event of a litigation. The ruling was made by George W. Bush-appointee Judge Leslie Southwick, and Barack Obama-appointees Judges James Graves and Gregg Costa.
Elsewhere in the U.S. however, a handful of the country's largest hospital systems have eased up on the COVID vaccine mandates for staff after a federal judge temporarily halted the Biden administration's requirement for healthcare staff. The Wall Street Journal reported that HCA Healthcare Inc. and Tenet Healthcare Corp., as well as nonprofits AdventHealth and the Cleveland Clinic are dropping the COVID vaccine mandates in the face of labor shortages. The report revealed that "vaccine mandates have been a factor constraining the supply of healthcare workers," as per hospital executives, nursing groups, and public-health authorities.
Many hospitals continue to struggle with staffing shortages as a result of pandemic burnout coupled with overreaching vaccine mandates from the Biden administration. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) survey revealed in September that up to 30% of workers at over 2,000 hospitals in the U.S. remain unvaccinated.
"It's been a mass exodus, and a lot of people in the healthcare industry are willing to go and shop around," Wade Symons of the consulting firm Mercer explained. "If you get certain healthcare facilities that don't require it, those could be a magnet for those people who don't want the vaccine. They'll probably have an easier time attracting labor."
