West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey Readies New Vaccine Mandate Suit as Others Get Supreme Court Date
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CHARLESTON -- As earlier COVID-19 vaccine mandate lawsuits get their day before the U.S. Supreme Court in two weeks, West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey is readying another lawsuit to block mandates.
The U.S. Supreme Court set Friday, Jan. 7, for oral arguments for COVID-19 vaccine mandates for businesses with more than 100 employees and for healthcare workers. The announcement was made Wednesday evening.
"If the Court interprets the law correctly, we will win," Morrisey said on Twitter Wednesday night in response to the announcement.
West Virginia is one of multiple states that have filed suit against the federal government over mandates put in place by President Joe Biden to slow the growth of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths.
The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration released rules last month requiring companies with more than 100 employees to either get their employees vaccinated against COVID-19 or implement a weekly testing regimen for employees who choose to remain unvaccinated.
Companies had until Jan. 4 to implement the policy, but a federal court granted an injunction to block the rule Nov. 6. A three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Court of Appeals lifted the injunction last week in a 2-1 decision.
The healthcare worker mandate requires COVID-19 vaccinations for healthcare workers in facilities that receive funding from Medicare and Medicaid. West Virginia was part of a 12-state coalition opposing the mandates.
The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana issued an order at the end of November granting a preliminary injunction to prevent enforcement of the healthcare worker mandate, prompting an appeal by the Biden administration.
In a new announcement Wednesday, Morrisey said West Virginia was joining a 24-state lawsuit to block COVID-19 vaccine mandates for staff and volunteers of Head Start programs, as well as mandates requiring children in Head Start programs to wear masks.
"This is yet another unlawful attempt by the Biden administration to impose vaccine mandates upon workers and volunteers, which will hurt already-struggling staffs in underserved communities and likely impede child development," Morrisey said. "This effort goes even further by requiring universal masking for everyone over the age of 2 who is associated with the program."
Head Start is an early childhood education program for low-income families. Head Start staff and volunteers have until Jan. 31 to comply with the vaccine mandate. Students are either funded directly by Head Start or through local funding. The mask mandate would only apply for staff, volunteers, and children funded directly through Head Start, potentially segregating those students from locally funded students who don't fall under the mask requirement.
"These public schools anticipate that the Head Start Mandate will mean they will have to segregate the low-income students and force them to wear masks while the other students are allowed to breathe freely," the legal brief stated. "Not only is this stigmatizing them, but it is also a form of segregation."
"This mandate will ultimately hurt, not help the working families, single parents, and grandparents raising grandchildren who desperately depend on programs such as Head Start," Morrisey said in his statement.
Morrisey also joined with six other states last month in filing a suit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia to block Biden's COVID-19 vaccine mandate for federal contractors. That injunction was granted on Dec. 7.