by Joseph Curl at The Daily Wire
While the U.S. Supreme Court is currently weighing whether to allow President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for employers to stand, the Wall Street Journal said Sunday the issue is already moot.
“Federal courts considering the Biden administration’s vaccination mandates — including the Supreme Court at Friday’s oral argument — have focused on administrative-law issues. The decrees raise constitutional issues as well. But there’s a simpler reason the justices should stay these mandates: the rise of the Omicron variant,” the paper wrote. “It would be irrational, legally indefensible and contrary to the public interest for government to mandate vaccines absent any evidence that the vaccines are effective in stopping the spread of the pathogen they target. Yet that’s exactly what’s happening here.”
Two federal agencies — the Health and Human Services Department and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration — issued mandates on November 5. At the time, the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 represented nearly all COVID-19 cases in the U.S. Three pharmaceutical companies currently have vaccines to protect the inoculated against that variant.
But the Omicron variant now accounts for nearly every new case of the virus blanketing the U.S., according to the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported last week. The new strain represented 95.4% of sequenced COVID-19 cases during the week ending on New Year’s Day, while the once-dominant Delta variant made up just only 4.6% of sequenced cases, the CDC said.
Omicron took over in just a matter of weeks. At the beginning of December, the variant accounted for less than 1% of sequenced cases, with Delta making up 99% of them. By the week ending on Christmas Day, the CDC estimated the variant to be 58.6% of all new cases.
The Journal said the morphing situation makes the mandates “obsolete.”
“Because some of Omicron’s 50 mutations are known to evade antibody protection, because more than 30 of those mutations are to the spike protein used as an immunogen by the existing vaccines, and because there have been mass Omicron outbreaks in heavily vaccinated populations, scientists are highly uncertain the existing vaccines can stop it from spreading. As the CDC put it on Dec. 20, ‘we don’t yet know . . . how well available vaccines and medications work against it,” the paper wrote, adding:…
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