These are the folks who have final say on whether you either take the vaccine or be ostracized from society.
The question before the court is – Does the executive branch have the authority to issue vaccine mandates to private citizens? For some reason, the liberal justices don’t address that issue, pontificating instead on the merits of vaccines and vaccine mandates.
Here are some of the things the liberal justices claimed during the hearings7 –
- Sotomayor – 100,000 children infected and many on ventilators (the 7 day average for hospitalized children under 18 is 766.5)
- Sotomayor – Hospitals overrun (while there are some locally stressed hospitals, hospitals in general are not overwhelmed with COVID cases.)
- Sotomayor – “we are now having deaths at an unprecedented amount.” (That’s incorrect. COVID deaths reached their peak in January 2021.8)
- Sotomayor – Omicron is as deadly as Delta (incorrect4).
- Breyer – 750 million new cases yesterday (There have been 54 million total reported cases since the pandemic began6.)
- Breyer – finds it “unbelievable that it could be in the public interest to suddenly stop these vaccinations.”3 (The case is not about stopping vaccinations.)
- Breyer – “So if we delay [the mandate] a day, …, then 750,000 more people will have COVID who otherwise, …, wouldn’t have” (The vaccine mandate will not prevent 750,000 people per day from getting COVID.)
- Kagan – “We know that the best way to prevent spread is for people to get vaccinated,” (We don’t know that.)
The federal government has never mandated vaccines for private citizens before. OSHA is not a medical organization, but has the authority to regulate workplace hazards, not any hazard encountered in one’s life. OSHA has never before mandated a flu vaccine, although the attorney for the government said in court that they may do so in the future. OSHA has never mandated something that has negative consequences when implemented.
Piling on with the liberal Supreme Court justices was the head of the CDC, Rochelle Walensky. Under questioning from Brett Baier on Fox News Sunday, she refused to discuss the Supreme Court’s “facts” regarding how many children were hospitalized, how many were on ventilators, how many people are in the hospital because of COVID as opposed to there for other reasons who happened to test positive, etc.6
To their credit, the Conservative justices stuck to the issue in question –
- Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the states and Congress, rather than a federal agency, were better suited to address the pandemic in the nation’s workplaces. “This is something that the federal government has never done before,” he said, adding that the administration’s several virus-related mandates were “a workaround” in response to congressional inaction.3
- Roberts said. “It sounds like the sort of thing that states will be responding to, or should be, or that Congress should be.”5
- Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh suggested that the governing statute had not authorized the agency to impose the mandate clearly enough, given the political and economic stakes.3
- Gorsuch said that the administration seems to be using various legal pretexts to create what amounts to a general vaccine mandate that Congress so far has declined to impose or authorize. He added that “traditionally, states have had the responsibility for overseeing vaccination mandates.”5
Check out this article on why the mandate will fail in the Supreme Court –
The Supreme Court Seems Inclined To Block OSHA’s Vaccine Mandate.
1 Supreme Court’s liberal justices slammed over vax mandate statements
2 Liberal Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor under fire
3 Supreme Court’s Conservative Majority Appears Skeptical of Biden’s Virus Plan
4 WHO has not seen any reports of deaths caused by omicron variant
5 Justice Sotomayor Exaggerated the Number of Severe COVID-19 Cases Among Children