Appeals court revives federal worker vaccine mandate

An appeals court panel Thursday ruled 2-1 to reinstate President Joe Biden’s requirement that federal employees get vaccinated against COVID-19. The appellate judges decided that the lower-court federal judge who imposed an injunction on the mandate in January did not have the jurisdiction to do so. The panel also ordered the dismissal of the lawsuit against the mandate, saying the plaintiffs should have challenged it through the government’s internal process for employees.

What happens now? The mandate requires roughly 3.5 million federal employees to be vaccinated, have a religious or medical exemption, or risk termination from their jobs. The White House reported in December that 97.2 percent of federal workers had already complied. The administration has not announced when it will start enforcing the mandate. Although COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations have dropped dramatically since Biden issued the executive order in September, cases have begun rising again in metro areas like Washington, D.C., and New York City, likely fueled by the contagious BA.2 omicron subvariant. The spike is still well below the surges in early January.

Dig deeper: Read Steve West’s report in Liberties about legal challenges to the military’s vaccine mandate.