In the latest chapter in the dizzying fight over private employer vaccine mandates, on December 17, 2021, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals lifted a sister appellate court’s stay of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) requirement that employers with 100 or more U.S. employees require vaccination or weekly testing and face coverings as part of a comprehensive COVID-19 mitigation strategy. As we previously reported, President Biden announced in September 2021 that he would be directing OSHA to adopt rules that require vaccination or testing, which rule (the OSHA Emergency Temporary Standard, or ETS) was published in early November, to mixed reviews. So mixed, in fact, that nearly three dozen lawsuits were filed to permanently stay or invalidate the ETS. The first to result in a decision was heard by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, a panel of which concluded in a 2-1 decision that implementation of the ETS should be stayed as the measure was not required and exceeded the scope of OSHA’s authority. From there, the various suits filed across the country seeking to invalidate the ETS were consolidated for review by a single court, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. A historically conservative jurisdiction, many assumed that the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals would follow the Fifth Circuit and deem the ETS unconstitutional, or at least improvidently issued. Even OSHA appeared skeptical that the ETS would survive the Sixth Circuit’s review, as the...
The Department of Health and Human Services capped off a week of intensive anti-fraud activity with the launching of a six-month healthcare False Claims Act self-disclosure pilot program in partne...