A federal judge in Texas blocked the Biden administration from enforcing its Covid-19 jab mandate for federal employees on Friday.
President Joe Biden first issued an executive order demanding more than 3.5 million federal workers get the shot before Nov. 22. If employees didn’t comply, they could lose their jobs.
In the Friday ruling, Judge Jeffrey Vincent Brown of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas said that until litigation regarding Biden’s federal mandate is decided, the Democrat administration and government cannot force the private medical decision on Americans “with the stroke of a pen and without input from Congress.”
“While vaccines are undoubtedly the best way to avoid serious illness from COVID-19, there is no reason to believe that the public interest cannot be served via less restrictive measures than the mandate, such as masking, social distancing, or part- or full-time remote work,” Brown wrote. “Stopping the spread of COVID-19 will not be achieved by overbroad policies like the federal-worker mandate.”
Brown also noted that Biden’s order would “require millions of federal employees to undergo a medical procedure as a condition of their employment” which “under the current state of the law as just recently expressed by the Supreme Court, is a bridge too far.”
In response, Biden’s Department of Justice signaled it would appeal the injunction to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The order comes just one week after the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate demanding private companies require the Covid-19 shot. The ruling saved 84 million workers from what some justices dubbed an “unconstitutional” overreach of power by the federal government.
