Louisiana leads 16-state
coalition in amended CMS Lawsuit
BATON ROUGE, LA – Louisiana Attorney General Jeff
Landry continues the fight to protect our healthcare heroes from the Biden
administration’s COVID-19 vaccination mandate. In a new action filed today,
Attorney General Landry led a 16-state coalition to ask a federal judge to once
again block the federal government from enforcing the mandate in their
respective states before it goes into effect.
The unlawful mandate for facilities that receive
Medicare or Medicaid funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services is “causing havoc in the healthcare labor market” across the nation –
especially in rural communities – and does not account for the pandemic’s
changing circumstances.
“The CMS vaccination rule
remains a misguided, one-size-fits-all, job-killing directive that does not
account for any change in circumstances – including how the vaccines do not
stop the transmission of the Omicron variant,” said Attorney General Jeff
Landry. “What’s more: the federal government has now made clear that it expects
the states to implement this flawed policy with state employees. So I will
continue fighting this ill-advised invasion of individual autonomy and my
state’s rights.”
The filing, which is the latest the ongoing case against
President Biden’s vaccine mandate for health care workers, seeks to stop the
federal government from enforcing the mandate in Louisiana before the February
14 deadline by which workers at covered facilities must have received a first
dose of a COVID-19 vaccine or have a pending or approved application for an
exemption.
According to data published by the AARP Public Policy
Institute, nursing home and long-term care facilities are already facing the worst
shortage of nurses and/or aides since the government began collecting this
information from nursing homes in May 2020. Low staffing levels in nursing
homes—particularly among registered nurses—are associated with worse outcomes
for residents, including more COVID-19 cases, deaths, and a higher likelihood
of outbreaks. The mandate will make these problems worse. “By forcing
healthcare workers to choose between their jobs or an experimental vaccine they
do not want, CMS is affirmatively pinching an already strained work-force—and
particularly so in rural areas within the States,” the lawsuit reads.
Recognizing this workforce shortage and the untenable
position in which it places covered healthcare facilities, federal guidance
permits vaccinated employees who are testing positive for COVID-19 to
return to work while prohibiting unvaccinated healthcare employees from working
unless they obtain an exemption.
As the milder Omicron variant now accounts for 99.9
percent of COVID-19 cases in the country, the Biden administration’s rationale
for rushing the mandate without the legally required opportunity for the public
to comment no longer exists. Additionally, merging research shows that standard
COVID-19 vaccinations provide little protection against transmission of the
Omicron variant, and federal authorities have begun to walk back prior claims
about the efficacy of the vaccines against this now-dominant variant.
Meanwhile, new guidance from the federal government
issued after the U.S. Supreme Court decision imposed a brand-new vaccine
mandate on state employees who survey and report whether Medicare and Medicaid
facilities are complying with applicable regulations, including the mandate
itself. This constitutes an “independent, substantive rule, and yet CMS failed
utterly to comply with the procedures required by [federal law]” yet again.
The CMS COVID-19 vaccine mandate also violates the Tenth
Amendment, the Spending Clause, the Anti-Commandeering Doctrine, and the
Nondelegation Doctrine.
The case number is 3:21-cv-03970 in the U.S. District
Court for the Western District of Louisiana. Louisiana is joined by Alabama,
Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Montana, Ohio,
Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia.