Biden Calls For Vaccination of Companies with More Than 100 Employees
President Biden recently unveiled a host of new policies targeted at raising the vaccinated population in the US. These policies include ensuring that health care workers are fully vaccinated as well as contractors and workers for the federal government. According to Joe Biden, the healthcare worker mandate alone will affect 17 million Americans.
However, the largest order that Biden is putting in place affects any company that employs 100 or more people, according to Biden, this will affect more than 80 million Americans. Biden’s guidelines for these companies is to vaccinate every employee. Biden, in his statement to the press, did give an alternative to vaccination, that being an employee shows a negative test at least once a week. However, due to the difficulty and inefficiency of this standard, many employers are foregoing this option in place of requiring vaccinations for all employees. This announcement from the president brought with it a load of controversy as there is still disagreement on how to correctly continue in this pandemic.
Many Americans agree that this is exactly what our country needs in this desperate time; however, another sizable portion of the population strongly disagrees with Biden’s mandate on a moral level as well as a constitutional one. Many Americans argue that Biden is violating the fundamental rights of the American people, namely the right to privacy and freedom of religion. With all of this debate, Biden may very likely see some challenges to his mandates in the courts, especially considering this is not the first time his choices while president have been called unconstitutional. However, even if Biden’s mandate is shown to be unconstitutional in the courts his administration may still have a defense, that being that the Constitution may be waved in times of crisis for the country, the most notable of these being when president Lincoln temporarily withheld freedom of the press during the Civil War.
Another challenge that Biden is facing with this mandate is that a significant portion of the population disapproves of this mandate due to the fact that there are exceptions to vaccination where an individual may not be able to get vaccinated due to medical reasons. This is a far smaller issue for the Biden administration in part because this will likely not cause any problems in the courts, however, it may result in Biden’s approval rating lowering slightly. That being said, thus far, Biden’s mandate is holding up in the courts with very few challenging it. In the end, only time will tell if this man date truly helps the US in its fight against the coronavirus and whether these decisions by the Biden administration will hurt their chances at re-election in 2024.
