One year ago, the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued an interim final rule requiring 15 types of health-care facilities that receive Medicare or Medicaid funding to ensure that their more than 10 million employees were vaccinated against Covid-19. This was one of multiple Biden administration mandates covering, in addition to medical workers, private employees at large firms (the OSHA mandate covering 84 million workers), federal contractors (one-fifth of the national workforce), 3.5 million federal employees, and Head Start employees, contractors, and volunteers. The administration designed these mandates to force American workers to choose between vaccination or their jobs. Federal courts have enjoined all of them except for the medical-worker one, which the Supreme Court allowed to continue. The administration withdrew the OSHA rule for private employees after the Court found that it exceeded OSHA’s statutory authority to address workplace hazards.
Now a coalition of 22 states, led by Montana attorney general Austin Knudsen, has made a convincing case for repealing the medical-worker vaccine mandate. The states, relying on a section of the Administrative Procedure Act that gives “an interested person the right to petition for the issuance, amendment, or repeal of a rule,” have filed a petition seeking repeal…
