CHARLESTON – A federal court in Louisiana has granted a preliminary injunction to a 12-state coalition that was seeking to stop additional vaccine mandates proposed by the Biden Administration.
The coalition, which includes West Virginia, had filed a lawsuit last month opposing COVID-19 vaccine mandates for health care workers in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana. The court granted the injunction November 30.
“We are pleased that the court made a sensible decision and sided with individual freedoms for health care workers,” West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey said in a press release. “Our group has successfully stopped this mandate from taking effect for the time being, and we believe the mandate will be struck down permanently moving forward.
Morrisey
“Such mandates threaten to further burden the health care sector and patient well-being in West Virginia, where a large percentage of nursing home and other long-term care facilities are already facing worker shortages.”
The federal district court order said the state coalition was likely to succeed on most of its claims. The states had argued that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) vaccine mandate on facilities that receive federal funding for treating patients exceeds the agency’s statutory authority and violates the Social Security Act’s prohibition on regulations that control the hiring and firing of health care workers. They said it also violates multiple federal laws, clauses and doctrines and the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The coalition also says such a mandate threatens the well-being of people who rely on services provided by the federal health care programs and the livelihoods of the people who provide that care.
The court’s ruling recognized that the states would suffer serious harm from having their own laws preempted and their state powers encroached.
The lawsuit notes that the vaccine mandate causes grave danger to vulnerable persons whom Medicare and Medicaid were designed to protect – the poor, sick, and elderly – by forcing the firing of “healthcare heroes” who are essential to providing vital medical services.
According to CMS, the vaccine mandate targets about a quarter of the nation’s health care workers, who have chosen not to get vaccinated.
Morrisey has said the vaccine mandate would hit the health care system in rural West Virginia particularly hard. Nursing homes and other long-term care facilities in the Mountain State are suffering from staff shortages. A large percentage of staff have chosen to remain unvaccinated, meaning the mandate could make the shortages much worse.
The complaint states that the vaccine mandate threatens to exacerbate already devastating shortages in health care staffing by forcing small rural hospitals to terminate their unvaccinated workers. If the unvaccinated staff quit or are fired, the complaint says those hospitals will be compelled to close certain divisions, cancel certain services or shutter altogether.
The lawsuit further states that the Biden Administration’s vaccine mandate violates the Tenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution by seeking “to commandeer state-employee surveyors to become enforcers of CMS’s unlawful attempt to federalize national vaccine policy and override the states’ police power on matters of health and safety.”
In addition to West Virginia, attorneys general from Louisiana, Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Mississippi, Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah are plaintiffs in the case.
