Vaccine mandates: congressional nondelegation and the future

Short of a Pearl Harbor attack or a stock market crash, it’s hard to imagine a more serious threat to the country’s well-being than the COVID-19 pandemic, which has taken the lives of 800,000 Americans, sickened millions more, brought the economy to a standstill, and disrupted just about every facet of contemporary life. Almost miraculously, basic medical research, largely funded by the government, was able to generate safe and effective vaccines with unprecedented speed. There was an end to this horrific experience.

Somehow—and it remains unclear just how—this vaccine, unlike the half-dozen others nearly every American has taken by age 5, became an article of political faith. Resisting the vaccine, questioning the very existence of the virus, inventing wild, nonexistent side effects, hawking useless and dangerous “cures,” were soon parts of political campaigns. And the virus mutated, people got sick in ever greater numbers, hospitals were overwhelmed, and the deaths kept mounting.

The Biden administration believed it had to take dramatic steps to confront COVID-19 by making vaccinations all but universal. It thought it had the tools to do so, either by Executive Order (EO) imposing vaccines or testing on those working for, selling to, or receiving Medicare funds from the federal government or by means of the Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Act, designed to protect the health and safety of workers everywhere. But as we write, here is their status: