A federal judge on Tuesday blocked the requirement of vaccination against COVID-19 for all employees in the health sector, a measure that the Biden Administration was going to start implementing next week.
This decision by federal district judge Terry A. Doughty, in Louisiana, adds to the one already ruled by a court in Missouri this Monday, which
prohibits the application of Biden's vaccination mandate to health employees in 10 states
that they filed a lawsuit about it.
Biden had set a December 6 deadline for hospital and nursing home workers to receive at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccines, and the second before January 4.
Protests against the COVID-19 vaccination requirement for healthcare employees, in Los Angeles, California, on September 18, 2021.Damian Dovarganes / AP
In total,
the federal order affects some 17 million workers nationwide
, who work in some 76,000 centers that receive federal funds.
[The omicron variant was already circulating in Europe before being detected in South Africa]
These two court decisions are added to the setback suffered by the Biden Administration in federal court with respect to another of its sanitary rules, which required companies with more than 100 employees to ensure that their workers were fully vaccinated or, otherwise, they require wearing face masks in their workplaces and undergoing routine COVID-19 testing.
The federal government alleges that sanitary rules are essential to curb the pandemic and are above state policies that prohibit vaccination mandates.
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More than 775,000 people have died in the United States from the virus
.
About 60% of the population has been inoculated.
However, in his ruling, US District Judge for St. Louis, Missouri, Matthew Schelp, alleged that Biden's vaccination requirement for healthcare workers violated "a traditional area of authority for states by imposing an unprecedented mandate. to make federal private medical decisions for millions of Americans. "
[New York asks to wear a mask indoors because of the omicron variant]
In response, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) argued that unvaccinated healthcare workers pose a greater risk to patients and the population they serve.
