Psst: Biden Still Hasn’t Imposed A Vaccine Mandate On Private Businesses

For more than two decades, Kerri Hayden has been the face of the nightly news in Cheyenne, Wyoming. But when she refused an edict imposed on her local television station, KGWN-TV, by its corporate owner to take the COVID-19 vaccination, she found herself canceled — literally. Gray TV, the broadcast behemoth that owns KGWN and 149 other affiliates, fired her. “I wanted the decision to be my choice, not a billion-dollar company’s,” she said. Hayden “became part of a small wave of TV journalists who have resigned or been dismissed in recent weeks over their opposition to vaccination requirements,” a wave cresting from Mississippi to Michigan, The Washington Post has reported.

The broadcast industry is far from alone: Stories of hundreds of workers leaving airlines over vaccine mandates have snared headlines nationwide. But the airlines differ from most other private-sector industries in one significant way: Companies like Southwest Airlines say they are subject to an executive order from President Joe Biden, which requires federal contractors to impose vaccine mandates on their employees.

Do you want to know a secret? Outside of federal contractors, there is no federal COVID-19 vaccine mandate for private businesses. Not yet, at least.

“The White House has also said it plans to require companies that employ 100 or more workers to require their employees be vaccinated or undergo regular Covid-19 testing, but that policy is awaiting a formal rule from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration,” reported the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. (Emphasis added.) For the moment, “most businesses are awaiting more details from OSHA.” But they may have to wait for some time. The federal government “hasn’t yet issued a final rule and it may not do so until next year,” according to Rick Newman of Yahoo! Finance.

Many companies refuse to implement a policy that doesn’t exist on paper because they value their employees’ decisions; others hold off because it would harm their competitiveness, or possibly their very survival. “If you require vaccination, I think we could lose 10%, 20% of the workforce,” said Scott Myers, CEO of the packaging firm Advanced Converting Works, during a panel discussion at the Milken Institute Global Conference.

Seemingly, the more an industry relies on actual human beings, the less likely it is to choose to cancel its employees’ free will with unwritten Democratic policy preferences. A recent poll found that 73% of trucking firms believe that “ignoring the vaccine mandate gives them a

*As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases