Washington, United States
en United States, in the country of individual liberties, the announcement of the Democratic president Joe Biden that the anti-vaccine vaccine will be mandatory for two-thirds of workers has sparked outrage among Republicans, who seek to launch a lawsuit against the government.
“This looks like a dictatorship,” Republicans said House of Representatives, when Tie he hadn’t even finished his speech on Thursday.
The Democratic president said, “We’ve been patient, but our patience is running out.”
After months of trying to persuade Americans to get vaccinated, even with rewards, the president took a clearly different tone to announce his new “strategy”: to make vaccination mandatory for about 100 million Americans.
“We’ve all had to pay for your refusal,” he said, referring to the 80 million Americans who are not yet vaccinated, or 25 percent of the population.
On Friday, the avalanche of outraged reactions from conservatives who appealed for “freedom” and threatened legal action continued to grow.
“The latest news says we live in a free country,” former President Donald Trump protested in an email to raise funds.
This is an “attack on private enterprise,” Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott reacted as he announced he had signed an executive order to “protect the right of Texans to choose to be vaccinated against the covid “.
“See you in court,” the Conservative governor of South Dakota told Biden.
The Republican Party “will sue this administration to protect Americans and their freedoms,” said party president Ronna McDaniel.
Like her, many Republicans say they support the vaccine, but are against mandatory vaccination. Others are skeptical of vaccines.
And Biden’s new tone seems to have sparked reactions from those sectors.
This “is not the way Americans expect their elected officials to speak to them,” former Donald Trump vice president Mike Pence told Fox News on Friday.
Fed since the boreal summer by the delta variant of the coronavirus, the pandemic has already killed 650,000 people in the United States.
Faced with this resurgence, the president on Thursday signed an executive order that will force government employees to be vaccinated in the coming weeks, without the option of undergoing periodic testing.
The order also applies to employees of contractors, staff in nursing homes and schools that depend on the federal government.
Even more controversial in a country where the central government is viewed with suspicion by conservatives, the decree bypasses the legislative power and authority of states in health matters, and also applies to the private sector.
From now on, employees of companies with more than 100 employees will be required to be vaccinated or subjected to a weekly screening test.
Legal battle –
For their part, Democrats and proponents of the new measures argue that other vaccines are already mandatory in the United States.
They also cite the jurisprudence and decisions of the Supreme Court, including one from 1905 that failed against an American who refused to be vaccinated against smallpox.
But that decision applied to state power, not federal power. And the question now will be whether the White House can impose this requirement by executive order.
The legal battle could be fierce.
The Republican Party’s demands “are frivolous,” Lawrence Gostin, a law professor at Georgetown University, said on Twitter.
And the Business Roundtable lobby, which represents the largest U.S. companies, “hailed” Biden’s policy on the virus.
Asked on Friday about Republican threats to ask, Biden was vindictive: “Let them try,” he said, adding that he was “especially disappointed that some Republican governors have acted so lightly on children’s health.” .
“We should not be doomed to this political debate,” Zano.