A federal judge in Texas on Friday halted enforcement of the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate for federal workers.
The preliminary injunction comes months after the White House announced that 95 percent of federal workers had already complied with the mandate.
The mandate was handed down in September. More than 3.5 million federal workers were required to get vaccinated by November 22 — without the option to test-out of the vaccine requirement. Workers could only be exempted from the mandate if they had applicable religious or medical exemptions.
“We are confident in our legal authority,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Friday in response to the ruling.
Judge Jeffrey Brown ruled that a lawsuit filed by Feds for Medical Freedom was likely to succeed at trial and issued an injunction stopping the government from enforcing the requirement.
Brown said his ruling was not indicative of whether people should get vaccinated against Covid-19, saying the court believes they should.
“It is instead about whether the president can, with the stroke of a pen and without the input of Congress, require millions of federal employees to undergo a medical procedure as a condition of their employment,” he wrote in a 20-page ruling.
He said the requirement was a “bridge too far.”
The decision comes after the Supreme Court temporarily suspended the Biden administration’s vaccine-or-test mandate for large employers last week. However, the justices allowed a vaccine mandate for health-care workers at facilities that receive federal funding to go into effect.
Meanwhile, the administration’s vaccine requirement for employees of federal contractors was blocked by a federal judge last month.
Source: National Review
