Corona Virus Sensation?

Biden Introduces Workplace Vaccine Mandate



U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday announced sweeping COVID-19 vaccine rules for U.S. workplaces in an effort to kickstart lagging vaccination rates as the delta variant of the coronavirus continues to infect and kill thousands across the country.



The new regulations call for workplaces with over 100 employees to mandate vaccinations or weekly tests—or face steep fines. The same applies to federal employees, government contractors, and those who work in facilities accepting federal health insurance. In all, the new rules cover 100 million workers.

Biden on Vaccine Mandates, October 2020: You Couldn’t Enforce That

STEPHANOPOULOS: How could you enforce that?



BIDEN: Well, you couldn’t. That’s the problem, just like can’t enforce — you can’t enforce measles. You can’t come to school until you have a measles shot. You can’t. But you can’t say, everyone has to do this. But you would — just like you can’t mandate a mask. But you can say — you can go to every governor and get them all in a room, all 50 of them, as president, and say, ask people to wear the mask. Everybody knows.



STEPHANOPOULOS: And if they don’t, fine?



BIDEN: If they don’t, no, not fine. Then I go to every governor — I go to every mayor, I go to every councilman, I go to every local official, say, mandate the mask, man — say, this is what you have to do when you’re out. Make sure you encourage it being done. Look, George, you and I know — and I think you do, too, as well — the words of a president matter.



Biden being Biden, he hemmed and hawed about whether he would trust the vaccine, then got confused halfway through his answer as to whether he was talking about mandating masks or mandating vaccines. But the best you can say is that Biden, a lawyer who had been in senior positions in the federal government for half a century, had not thought through the legal authority for such mandates five months into the pandemic. Two months later, at a press conference in Delaware after the election, he reiterated that view:



No, I don’t think it should be mandatory. I wouldn’t demand it be mandatory. But I would do everything in my power — just like I don’t think masks have to be made mandatory nationwide — I will do everything in my power as president of the United States to encourage people to do the right thing.



As we saw in the CDC eviction-moratorium fight, Biden either doesn’t know or doesn’t care what is within his legal authority as president. Donald Trump, at least, could use the excuse that he wasn’t a lawyer, had never served in government, and was encountering questions of federal executive authority for the first time. No president has ever come to the office with more preparation to answer these questions than Joe Biden. The fact that he is so cavalier about changing his positions on them raises serious issues of his character and, frankly, his mental state.

A Dallas man was charged $54,000 for his COVID-19 tests at an emergency room in Lewisville, Texas – a staggering fee that is not only legal, but hardly the only coronavirus test to break the bank for a time-desperate person during the pandemic.

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Warner, who is self-employed and has his own health care plan with Molina Healthcare, negotiated the price with the hospital to eventually bump it all the way down to $16,915.20. The insurer paid that in full.



"At least I’m not liable for anything," Warner told Kaiser Health News.

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