Showdown! Will Vaccine Mandates Prevail?

As American readers know, our Uniter-in-Chief announced a vaccine mandate for companies employing over 100 people. The rule has been drafted by OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) and is now in review. It is expected to take effect in December--or to put it more plainly, millions of employees are supposed to be fired right before Christmas for the offense of being unvaccinated. Is this really going to happen?

The day after the announcement, I talked to my boss, who's one of the owners where I work. He's a certified public accountant who advises businesses on compliance. He predicted lots of lawsuits and workarounds; I didn't get the sense there were any plans to fire unvaccinated employees.

We've seen employers who've already issued mandates and claimed only 1% or so of their workforce left. But given the shortages, shutdowns, delays, rising prices, and rapidly rising wages for certain types of jobs, a 1% difference in the workforce beggars belief. Further, it doesn't take many employees leaving at once to create bottlenecks, especially when they work in similar positions and there aren't many applicants to replace them. Southwest Airlines finally realized this and is now defying a separate federal mandate, encouraging pilots to apply for exemptions. The mayor of Chicago, on the other hand, hasn't been as quick to catch on.

As Mayor Lightfoot demands Chicago police get vaccinated, those officers have flooded police departments in northwest Indiana (just outside Chicago) with calls and emails seeking employment. Indiana Senator Mike Braun even invited them to contact his office so they can be put in touch with a police department that's hiring--the state police and the Indianapolis Metro Police Department among them. I imagine Senator Braun, who's a former employer himself, talked to the state attorney general about whether the upcoming OSHA mandate will be enforceable and got a response of "probably not."

The welcome sign is up for the folks who do the hardest job in the country.

When you give these crazy ultimatums like “Get the vaccine or lose your job” places like Indiana that don't believe in top-down mandates like Mayor Lightfoot and President Biden will benefit. pic.twitter.com/wgkpiOooEE
— Senator Mike Braun (@SenatorBraun) October 21, 2021

So there are indications, from people in a position to know, that federal mandates aren't going to fly and that employer mandates aren't necessarily workable.

Not only do vaccine mandates make no sense in terms of public health--COVID vaccination rates aren't correlated with COVID rates and provide only small reduction in transmission that recedes or disappears after three months--but they're causing turmoil and simply shuffling people around.

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