Happy New Year?

The Biden administration has outlined its requirements for COVID vaccines at large companies through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.  For companies with 100 or more employees, starting Tuesday, January 4, 2022, every employee has to either get vaccinated or subject himself or herself to weekly testing.

As soon as the order was handed down, though, multiple states and individuals - led by the Marquis de Sade of elected officials, Florida governor Ron DeSantis - sued to stop the directive, and the arch-conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals put a "temporary" stay on it.  The court's response, however, seemed to aim at making that stay permanent, as its wording was highly critical.

The Biden White House thinks it can win this case as it potentially makes its way up to the Supreme Court, where previous efforts to stop vaccine mandates have failed and where this effort will likely fail as well.  But as all of these cases proliferate in the court system, a different kind of case - COVID cases - continues to proliferate, as the number of infections seems to be rising faster than the number of vaccinations.  And they probably are; the vaccination rate has stagnated to the point where it can take up to three whole days for the rate of full vaccination to go up by a tenth of a percent, whereas it had previously taken only one day.  The death count will likely go up too, still not likely to reach two million to be as deadly as the 1918 pandemic in terms of a percentage of the population but still far more deaths than the 1918 pandemic per capita, and we can't afford any more deaths no matter how you measure them.  Recoveries?  No, the media still can't be bothered to report on those, though according to CoronaTracker.com, 37 million out of 47 million cases have been closed as of this past Sunday, for a 78.9 percent recovery rate.  

But, thanks to long COVID and continued vaccine resistance, along with a still-too-high seven-day new-case average, maybe none of that matters.  The only way out of this pandemic is to get more people vaccinated, and hopefully this court case will be ruled in favor of President Biden and we can indeed have a happy 2022.  Until we do get enough people vaccinated, though, we're going to have to continue to walk into banks looking like we're about to hold them up.  No wonder banking online is so popular these days.