“OSHA’s ETS, which it published on November 5, demands that companies with 100 or more employees require them to be vaccinated against COVID-19 or wear face masks and undergo weekly virus testing. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit stayed the ETS on November 6, citing “grave statutory and constitutional issues.” The 5th Circuit extended that stay a week later, when it said the mandate is “fatally flawed” because it “grossly exceeds OSHA’s statutory authority.”
After that ruling, the many lawsuits challenging the mandate were consolidated and assigned by lottery to the 6th Circuit, which the Biden administration asked to lift the 5th Circuit’s stay. In doing so, the 6th Circuit majority criticized the other appeals court for reaching hasty conclusions unsupported by precedent and for failing to properly consider the evidence that OSHA presented in favor of its mandate.
An emergency standard allows OSHA to circumvent the usual rule making process by publishing regulations that take effect immediately. But to avoid the public notice, comment, and hearing requirements that ordinarily apply to OSHA rules, the agency has to identify a “grave danger” to employees “from exposure to substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful or from new hazards.” It also has to show the emergency standard is “necessary to protect employees from such danger.”
In her 6th Circuit majority opinion, Stranch has little trouble concluding that COVID-19 qualifies as an “agent” that is “physically harmful.” Citing the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, she says “an ‘agent’ is ‘a chemically, physically, or biologically active principle,'” while “a virus is defined, in part, as ‘any [of a] large group of submicroscopic infectious agents.'””
…
“Larsen opens her dissent by chiding Stranch for misrepresenting reality. “The majority opinion describes the emergency rule at issue here as permitting employers ‘to determine for themselves how best to minimize the risk of contracting COVID-19 in their workplaces,'” she writes. “With respect, that was the state of federal law before the rule, not after.”
Larsen also suggests that Stranch has pulled a bait and switch. “The majority opinion initially agrees…that an emergency standard must be more than ‘reasonably necessary’; it must be ‘essential,'” she writes. “But then that word, and the concept, disappear from the analysis. What starts as a demand for an ‘essential’ solution quickly turns into acceptance of any ‘effective’ or ‘meaningful’ remedy; and later, acquiescence to a solution with a mere ‘reasonable’ ‘relationship’ to the problem. The majority opinion never explains why ‘necessary’ undergoes such a metamorphosis.”
As Larsen sees it, OSHA “has not made the appropriate finding of necessity.” She notes that “OSHA’s mandate applies, in undifferentiated fashion, to a vast swath of Americans: 84 million workers, 26 million unvaccinated, with varying levels of exposure and risk.” OSHA has the burden of explaining “why the rule should apply to a large and diverse class,” she says, but the agency “does not do so.””
…
“In some respects, Larsen thinks, OSHA’s judgments are inconsistent with the numbers it cites. “OSHA has determined that no vaccinated worker is in ‘grave danger,’ whereas all unvaccinated workers are,” Larsen writes. “But the government’s own data reveal that the death rate for unvaccinated people between the ages of 18 and 29 is roughly equivalent to that of vaccinated persons between 50 and 64. So an unvaccinated 18-year-old bears the same risk as a vaccinated 50-year-old. And yet, the 18-year-old is in grave danger, while the 50-year-old is not. One of these conclusions must be wrong; either way is a problem for OSHA’s rule.””
“Outgoing New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is urging the Biden administration to send help as the Covid-19 Omicron variant rises dramatically in the city’s five boroughs.
The variant’s lightning-fast spread in the city forced the cancellation of Radio City Music Hall’s annual “Christmas Spectacular” over the weekend and led Saturday Night Live to broadcast without a live studio audience and with a smaller cast.
De Blasio said the White House should invoke the Defense Production Act to help provide a larger number of at-home tests as well as monoclonal antibody treatments. He also said the Biden administration should fast-track approval of an antiviral pill from Pfizer.
“We need help now … and we need a surge of support in terms of monoclonal antibody treatments,” de Blasio said at a briefing on Sunday. “We need more made available for New York City.””
“One hospital being overwhelmed isn’t a one-hospital problem, it’s an every-hospital problem. Even if your community is not awash with Covid-19 or if most people are vaccinated, a major outbreak in your broader region, plus all the other patients hospitals are treating in normal times, could easily fill your hospital, too. That makes it harder for the health system to treat you if you come to the ER with heart attack symptoms or appendicitis or any acute medical emergency.”
“There appear to be millions of Americans walking around who have received a single dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, who may think they are protected against whatever the virus can throw at them — and who could be sorely wrong.
“I’m not sure we should regard them as equivalent to unvaccinated people,” Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization, told me. “But they are at higher risk than fully vaccinated and boosted people.”
That was the early consensus among the experts I consulted, and the preliminary data shows, as expected, low effectiveness against omicron after one dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. The effectiveness against omicron also declines over time after two doses but is restored to high levels (76 percent efficacy against infection) after a third dose. This was a fairly small study out of the UK, and more data will be forthcoming, but it gives an initial picture of how the vaccines are holding up against the new variant.
People who have received only one dose of a vaccine could conceivably be almost as vulnerable to infection from omicron as the unvaccinated. They may still have some level of protection against severe illness because of the multiple layers of immunity induced by the vaccines. But it’s an open question at this point — and may soon become an urgent one for the Americans who fall into this camp.”
“Governments make choices that shape millions of lives. Workers and businesses are taxed to provide health care to the elderly and to the least fortunate. Men and women are incarcerated or even killed for crimes defined by the state. Wars are fought. Refugees are given a place of safety or turned away at the border.
If you believe in democracy, such power is justified only because it flows from the will of the people. “Governments,” the United States declared in its formational document, “are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The premise of any democratic republic is that there are some decisions that must be made collectively, and that these decisions are legitimate because they are made by elected officials.
On Friday, the Supreme Court will hear two sets of cases that test the justices’ commitment to the idea that the right to govern flows from the will of the people, and both involve challenges to President Joe Biden’s efforts to encourage vaccination against Covid-19.
The first bloc of cases, which is likely to be consolidated under the case name Biden v. Missouri, challenges a federal rule requiring nearly all health care workers to become vaccinated. The second bloc, which is likely to be consolidated under the name NFIB v. Department of Labor, challenges a rule requiring workers at companies with 100 or more employees to either get vaccinated or be regularly tested for Covid-19.
Even on their faces, the stakes in Missouri and NFIB are enormous. These cases ask what steps the United States can realistically take to quell the spread of a disease that has already killed more than 820,000 Americans. But the full stakes in these cases are even higher.
Someone has to decide how the United States will respond to a global pandemic, and the Biden administration’s argument essentially boils down to a case for democracy. An elected Congress authorized the executive branch to take certain steps to encourage vaccination, and Joe Biden was elected to lead that branch. So that means that President Biden and his duly appointed subordinates get to make difficult decisions, even if some Americans don’t like those decisions.
The parties challenging Biden’s policies, meanwhile, effectively argue that the Supreme Court should decide America’s vaccination policy. They couch their arguments in arcane legal doctrines, with weighty-sounding names like the “Major Questions Doctrine” or “nondelegation,” But these doctrines are vague — so vague that they are easily manipulated by justices who disagree with the Biden administration’s policies and wish to conceal their desire to halt those policies behind a patina of legal reasoning.
I don’t want to minimize the significance of the policies at issue in Missouri and NFIB. In creating these policies, the Biden administration determined that its fundamental duty to preserve human life overrides many individuals’ interest in refusing medical treatment. This is a weighty decision, placing the collective health of the nation before the individual liberties of many of its citizens.
But the Biden administration estimates that its two vaccine regulations will save hundreds or even thousands of lives every month. And it decided that saving those lives is worth requiring some Americans to do something they don’t want to do. This decision is no more significant than many of the decisions governments make — to send troops to a distant conflict, to tax and to spend that money in service of a nation’s people, to save lives, or to take them. This is what governments do.
Again, someone needs to decide what America’s vaccination policy will be. It will either be made by the man chosen by the American people, or the Supreme Court will wrest that decision away from him and give it to themselves.”
“Some of the causes are fairly self-evident: Entering the third year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the US — and much of the rest of the world — is grappling with a supply chain crisis. That means most goods, from game consoles to oranges, are more difficult to get to store shelves for one reason or another, whether it’s a lack of critical tech components or a backup at ports due to labor shortages. But US consumers simply haven’t stopped buying, and that demand-supply disjunction has caused record inflation.
Some economists, as well as President Joe Biden, take the view that the pandemic — and the pandemic-snarled supply chain — are the primary culprits, and inflation will ease as the US keeps combating the pandemic and implements supply-chain fixes. On Friday, according to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, Biden told reporters that “the reason for inflation is that we have a supply chain problem that is really severe.”
Others, though, are concerned the problem is bigger than that. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, for example, has also pointed to government spending as a reason for increased inflation, and believes it’s far from a bump in the road.”
…
“lockdowns and being stuck at home — unable to travel or go to restaurants, bars, and live events — have shifted what Americans are spending their money on. Less money spent on travel or experiences, combined with stimulus funds, has driven many Americans to buy more consumer goods. That, combined with supply chain problems decades in the making and exacerbated by the pandemic, has led to the current, precipitous rise in inflation.”
…
“While the US has spent trillions in pandemic relief, however, inflation is also occurring elsewhere in the world, where governments have taken different approaches to dealing with the fallout from the pandemic — suggesting that government spending doesn’t tell the whole story.”
…
“While the Biden administration is doing what it can to fix supply chain issues and drive down rising gas prices, most of the tools to address inflation are in the hands of the Federal Reserve.”
…
“One way the Fed plans to cool the economy is “tapering” — gradually decreasing the $120 billion it spends per month on government-backed bonds, which has injected money into the financial markets during the pandemic. In November, Fed Chair Jerome Powell announced the central bank would reduce that amount by $15 billion each month. The purchasing program is supposed to end halfway through 2022, but as the New York Times reported in early December, it could finish more quickly as the Fed attempts to reduce inflation.
“At this point, the economy is very strong, and inflationary pressures are high,” Powell said in late November. “It is therefore appropriate in my view to consider wrapping up the taper of our asset purchases, which we actually announced at our November meeting, perhaps a few months sooner.”
Along with that could also come interest rate hikes, although the Fed has not announced specific plans to do so.”
…
“Beyond monetary policy, though, the other massive piece of the puzzle is the supply chain — and that’s something politicians and policymakers have much less control over. Biden has attempted to ease supply chain woes by running the Port of Los Angeles 24 hours a day, clearing the docks so goods don’t wait for days on cargo ships stranded in the water. And the release of 50 million barrels of oil from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve last month was geared toward reducing gas prices, which have already begun to fall.
Most likely, however, the supply chain will remain snarled for the foreseeable future — keeping inflation higher than we’re used to — and policymakers will have to react to that reality.”
“Earlier this year, schools around the country received more than a hundred billion dollars from the federal government—American taxpayers, in truth—in order to recover from the pandemic and finally get back to the task of teaching kids.
The feds stipulated that 20 percent of that money be put toward addressing learning losses during the pandemic, but the bulk of it can be spent at schools’ discretion. Which means, of course, that many schools are using this sudden injection of cash to make improvements that have nothing to do with keeping COVID-19 at bay.
“Some districts are investing big money in initiatives that don’t appear at first glance strictly COVID-related,” notes Education Week. “Miami-Dade schools plan to spend $30 million, or $86 per student, on cybersecurity. Raleigh County schools in West Virginia lists a $9 million effort—more than $800 per student—to expand an elementary school, adding nine classrooms, upgrading the library, expanding the kitchen, and separating the cafeteria and the gym. The Newport News school district in Virginia is spending $840,000 for a new student information system to help teachers catalog students’ academic progress.”
An unnamed school district will use some of its COVID-19 relief funds to install vape detection devices, purchase new student ID cards, and build a tennis court.
Indeed, many districts seem to be spending significant chunks of money on upgrading athletic facilities and expanding stadiums, according to Education Week. Athletics can be an important part of many students’ lives, and letting kids get back to sports was a good reason (among many) to move away from the soul-crushing farce of virtual learning and get everybody back in school. But a slightly nicer football field probably isn’t going to improve students’ test scores or make them safer from COVID-19, which after all are the two primary justifications for all the spending.”
“Data from the Kauffman Foundation indicate that the percent of new entrepreneurs who created a business by choice instead of necessity dropped from 86.86 percent in 2019 to 69.75 percent last year. Many people happy to work for somebody else were pushed into starting a business by pandemic-era chaos.
But a lot of those people seem to have discovered that they actually like working for themselves, and that may be causing a cultural shift. At the end of November, The Wall Street Journal reported that at least part of the “Great Resignation” phenomenon of Americans quitting jobs involved people starting businesses.”