A federal judge blocked President Joe Biden’s Administration from enforcing a COVID-19 vaccine mandate on health care workers in ten states, including Nebraska. In his statewide news conference today, Governor Pete Ricketts said this is good news for the state.
Ricketts says, “We got the temporary injunction and that is a start. That means all our rural hospitals and health care facilities will not have to do a vaccine mandate. This is critical for us in Nebraska because I talked to administrators, for example, who were telling me they would have to stop delivering babies because they didn’t have enough staff. This would actually impact the quality of care that we would be providing in our rural settings especially because they wouldn’t have the staff because people weren’t going to take the vaccine.”
Ricketts goes on to say the vaccine is a miracle of modern medicine to get it developed in such a short period of time but this is a personal health choice that should not be mandated.
This is the first step in the process. Ricketts says the federal government will likely take this to the 8th Circuit Court. Whowins there will take it to the U.S. Supreme Court so this is the first step in fighting this “huge federal overreach”.
Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming were in the coalition of states suing against the mandate. The federal judge stated the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid had no clear authority from Congress to enact the mandate for providers that participate in the two programs. The ruling means workers in the 10 states will not have to get their first vaccine by December 6th and their second dose by January 4th.