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....Vaccine Mandates continued from page 5
In reviewing the AMA legal stance, one quickly runs into very complex legal discourse, involving statutes that have come before the Supreme Court (SC). Some were reviewed recently, and others were reviewed a few years ago. The statutes in some instances received supportive opinion language embracing mandate-like issues, BUT these decisions additionally inluded elaborate dissenting opinions by very prominent SC justices, reflecting their views and differing opinions.
There is more. On December 30, 2021, the AMA filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court urging the court to uphold the federal government’s mandatory vaccinations and testing requirements for large businesses. This also took into account health care facilities that accept Medicare and Medicaid funding. An amicus brief can be filed while a case is on appeal. It literally means “friend of the court” and the goal of the brief is to argue for a favorable decision favored by the entity or individual filing the brief. The AMA had urged the Supreme Court to reject recent challenges and to preserve the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) emergency temporary standard for covid-19 vaccination and testing for large businesses.
As argued in the brief, the AMA believes that halting enforcement of required vaccinations and testing for employers with more than 100 employees would “cause severe and irreparable harm to the public interest..
The brief references other mitigation measures, such
as mask-wearing and social distancing. Per the AMA, although it states that these measures remain important, these “do not ... rise to the level of protection that mandating widespread uptake of vaccinations would provide.” The AMA-led brief was joined by 15 medical organizations that promote widespread vaccination as the best evidence-based strategy to protect public health and defeat the covid-19 pandemic.
[It is important to mention that some may refuse the vaccine for religious reasons however, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the only people who should clearly qualify for an exemption from vaccination are those who have a severe allergic reaction after a first vaccine dose or have a known allergy to a component of the vaccine].
So how did this all turn out. On January 7, 2022, regarding the issue of vaccine mandates, the SC blocked the enforcement of sweeping vaccine or-test requirements for large private companies, but it allowed a vaccine mandate to stand for medical facilities that take Medicare or Medicaid payments. Lastly, the OSHA mandate was allowed to stand. This required that workers at businesses with 100 or more employees get vaccinated or submit a negative covid test weekly to enter the workplace. At present, there are challenges to this ruling.
The next question is, what happens to companies/ businesses with fewer than 100 employees and/or those that fall outside of the January 7, 2022 SC decision? Who is making the rules.
This is being played out very publicly everyday as companies/businesses and people struggle and protest to protect the autonomy to decide whether they
are supporters or dissenters in their quest to make decisions. Time will tell as the covid pandemic and its variants carve their destructive paths through 2022 and maybe beyond. Mandates may be here to stay, and they may very well depend on what these paths look like going forward.
I would like to thank Dr(s) Sharma, Adelman and Bush for their valuable contributions to this article.
References:
https://ourworldindata.org/attitudes-to-covid-vaccinations https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-vaccine-willingness-and-people-vaccinated-by-month?country=~FRA https://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/ama-urges-supreme-court-uphold-vaccination-mandates https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-urges-scotus-preserve-osha-vaccination-testing-requirement
22 Detroit Medical News
First Quarter 2022