In the past several days, two federal vaccine mandates have been preliminarily enjoined, joining the OSHA Emergency Temporary Standard on the sidelines.
First, the Eastern District of Missouri entered a preliminary injunction against the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' federal vaccine mandate for healthcare facilities. That injunction applies to covered employees in Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming. The Western District of Louisiana issued a similar ruling late yesterday, but expanded the scope of the preliminary injunction nationally.
Then, also late yesterday, the Eastern District of Kentucky issued its own preliminary injunction against President Biden's mandatory vaccination rules for the employees of federal contractors and subcontractors. That injunction applies to covered employees in Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee.
What does this all mean? Right now, if you're a health-care employer or in one of the three states impacted by the federal contractor ruling, you're in a waiting pattern. You should continue to plan for these to take effect, and you're always free to mandate the vaccine on your own without any government rule to follow.
Otherwise and overall, however, I believe that these two decisions don't mean a whole heck of a lot. The Courts of Appeals are next, followed by the Supreme Court. And, unlike the legal issues facing the OSHA ETS for employers with 100 or more employees, the CMS vaccinate mandate and the federal contractor vaccine mandate each stand on their own merits — the importance of a fully vaccinated national health care system and the ability of the federal government to set the terms of conditions of its contracts. Thus, while each of these two new stays have garnered a lot of headlines, at the end of the day these decisions should be outliers that don't amount to much.