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The challenge to President Biden's COVID-19 vaccine mandates as issued through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) will be heard in this courtroom.

This is the courtroom of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, Ohio, which won by lottery the right to decide the challenges to the mandates.  Alas, the Sixth Court of Appeals has a conservative majority, fortified by Trump appointees.  Legal experts are already leaving the OSHA mandates for dead because of that.  The plaintiffs charge that the mandates are too broad and unworkable and fail to take differences between workplaces into account - an argument sure to please many a right-wing judge.  Others say it will certainly go to the Supreme Court, where the conservative majority has, like that on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, been fortified by Trump appointees - Trump appointed more Supreme Court justices than any other President since Reagan.  This is all happening as another wave of COVID infections is taking shape - much to the indifference of the businesses and the Republican-led states that initiated this challenge.

Before you throw up your hands and declare that the vaccine mandate is doomed and that COVID is going to infect the large minority - about 41 percent - of Americans who have not been and will not be vaccinated an prolong the pandemic until the end of time,  just bear a few things in mind.  First, COVID cases, as previously noted, are rising again, and the pretext of the suits was the fact that cases were declining . . . that is, until recently.  That ought to give the Sixth Circuit judges some pause.  Second, the Supreme Court has already rejected three challenges to vaccine mandates, so if President Biden does have to appeal to the Supreme Court, his chances there are better than in the Sixth Circuit.  Third, there are other lawsuits pending against the OSHA mandates  - from labor unions who think the mandates don't go far enough and want to expand them to include smaller businesses.  Most of them are suing in the more liberal Second Circuit Court of Appeals, based in New York City. 

There's still a chance that the mandates will survive court challenges, and if they don't, the Biden administration is likely to craft new ones to satisfy the complaints against the old ones.  It may be working on them already. 

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.