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Judge blocks Biden vaccine rule, citing “liberty interests of the unvaccinated”
A federal judge yesterday blocked a Biden administration COVID-19 vaccine mandate for health care workers, granting a request for preliminary injunction filed by Republican attorneys general from 14 states.
US District Judge Terry Doughty ruled that the government lacks authority to implement the rule that "requires the staff of twenty-one types of Medicare and Medicaid healthcare providers to receive one vaccine by December 6, 2021, and to receive the second vaccine by January 4, 2022." Providers that don't comply face penalties, including "termination of the Medicare/Medicaid Provider Agreement."
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) mandate regulates over 10.3 million health care workers in the US, of which 2.4 million are unvaccinated. The Biden vaccine rule is being challenged by the attorneys general from Louisiana, Montana, Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio. The Republican AGs' lawsuit was filed against CMS and the US Department of Health and Human Services.
The preliminary injunction they won applies nationwide except for 10 states that "are already under a preliminary injunction order dated November 29, 2021, issued by the Eastern District of Missouri," a court order said. Those states are Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, New Hampshire, Nebraska, Wyoming, North Dakota, and South Dakota.
What states did not participate in this lawsuit and were not covered by the earlier preliminary injunction — i.e. got swept into this decision?
California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District Of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday December 02 2021, @06:49PM (2 children)
Which sounds great, until you realize that your current or prospective insurance company now needs to be able to know your vaccination status somehow. And that's hard to do in an environment where people are already creating fake vaccination cards to get into concerts and as such would probably have no issue using said fake vaccination cards to save $100 a month on health insurance. And they can't really verify from the pharmacy without running into HIPAA and ACA prohibitions against digging into preexisting conditions.
It's an old story of a relatively small minority of idiots / selfish jerks ruining things for everybody else.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 03 2021, @02:55AM (1 child)
You sign a release when you get your health insurance that allows them to contact your medical providers and the state to verify certain health information already and you sign releases with your providers that they can share the information with your insurance. Also they can verify prexisting conditions, they just cannot discriminate based on them, which doesn't really matter since vaccination status for any vaccine isn't a medical condition under the ACA or administrative rules.
(Score: 2) by legont on Friday December 03 2021, @05:03AM
In Russia an antivaxxer just bribes $100 to the nurse and she shots the can instead of him. About 10% of vaccinated are like this.
How do they know? Well, when an antivaxxer ends up in a hospital, the treatment for Covid is actually quite different for vaccinated and unvaccinated folks. Like live or die different. So Russians developed a test to check if a patient was actually vaccinated to make sure she is not lying.
That was all in the name of saving lives, but lately they introduced harsh punishments for such people. They do have to recover costs somehow, right?
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.