A three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals Eleventh Circuit will hear oral arguments April 8 on a nationwide order enjoining the Joe Biden administration from enforcing its COVID-19 vaccine mandate for most workers employed by federal contractors.
The hearing in Atlanta, formally scheduled in an online order posted Wednesday, will consider whether to lift the restraining order issued in December by a federal district judge in Georgia.
The order by U.S. District Judge Stan Baker in the Southern District of Georgia prompted the Department of Energy and other federal agencies to temporarily suspend any plans for firing employees, not qualifying for exemptions, who refuse to be vaccinated against the illness that according to figures from the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Center had killed nearly 900,000 Americans as of Friday.
The judge last month declined to rule upon a Department of Justice request to clarify how the December ruling should affect contractors that elect to keep a COVID-19 employee vaccine mandate in place even if the federal government no longer requires them to do so.
Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, the manager of the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, Triad National Security, which manages the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and Jacobs-led CH2M HILL BWXT West Valley, the remediation contractor for the West Valley Demonstration Project in Western New York, are entities within the DOE weapons complex that have signaled an intention to keep a vaccine mandate on the books.
President Biden issued executive orders in September prompting federal workplace task force guidance that effectively mandated the jab for employees of the U.S. government and its contractors who did not qualify for medical or religious exemptions.
Meanwhile COVID-19 continues to bedevil the DOE’s $7.5-billion Office of Environmental Management (EM). A spokesperson for the office said via email Thursday there were a whopping 775 confirmed cases within the past week, up 215 from the prior week’s total of 560. The nuclear cleanup office has said more than 90% of its federal and contractor workforce have been vaccinated and, as recently as early December, the EM weekly COVID count was at 65.
As COVID, and the omicron variant play out, DOE is seeking to end its maximum telecommuting approach to coping with the virus and return more workers to offices and sites by mid-March.
