This week, a group of congressional Republicans threatened to shut down the government over President Joe Biden’s “vaccine mandate.”
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration rule would not require employers to take action against unvaccinated workers as long as they are willing to be tested weekly for COVID-19, but Republicans have ignored that provision.
“When you’re unwilling to describe something accurately, it betrays a weakness in your position. It’s not a vaccine mandate. It is a vaccine-or-testing mandate,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said on the Senate floor Thursday evening.
Indeed, the OSHA rule, which is currently stalled in court and has yet to go into effect, does not require people to get shots. It requires large employers to implement programs in which workers who work indoors are either vaccinated or wear masks and are tested for COVID-19 on a weekly basis.
Employers can mandate that their employees receive the vaccine if they so desire (as many employers already do). However, OSHA’s rule gives every employer the option to test.
Kaine is not the only proponent of the rule who is frustrated by Republicans’ lack of nuance. Former OSHA Administrator David Michaels stated that employers are not required to force a vaccine on anyone, but rather to keep infected workers out of the workplace.
“Misrepresenting OSHA’s rule is a cynical tactic by Republican politicians and anti-vaxxers who seem to want to prolong the pandemic and the misery it has brought, in order to hurt the Joe Biden Administration,” Michaels said in an email.
Testing is an option under the rule, but it would most likely be inconvenient — and that may be the intention. In the preamble to the rule’s text, OSHA refers to vaccination as “the most effective and efficient control available” to prevent virus transmission. Weekly tests present logistical and financial challenges, making vaccination more appealing.
OSHA’s rule would not require employers to pay for testing, raising concerns about how the cost would be covered.
The cost of COVID-19 tests must be covered by insurers under federal law, but not tests performed as part of workplace screening. On Thursday, the Joe Biden administration announced that insurers will be required to reimburse the cost of over-the-counter tests.
Such tests are acceptable under the OSHA rule if they are approved by the Food and Drug Administration, but it is unclear whether insurers will be required to reimburse for tests performed for OSHA compliance.
Another headache: “Home” tests not done under the supervision of a manager would have to be observed by a “telehealth proctor.”
Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and George Washington University public health professor, believes the Biden administration should clarify whether regular over-the-counter tests for work must be reimbursed. However, she also stated that there is a good public health reason for the obnoxiousness of the weekly testing regime.
“In general, we need to make vaccination a simple and convenient choice, so requiring employees to mask and test is the right thing to do for public health reasons,” Wen explained in an interview. “It provides an additional incentive to vaccinate.” Republicans have omitted the testing option from their descriptions of the mandate, but when asked about it, they have shrugged it off.
Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas), the Senate Republicans’ ringleader in opposing the mandate, said firms with more than 100 employees, the threshold for being subject to the requirement, could not possibly handle testing their workforce.
