Partisan Claims About Flight Cancellations Lack Evidence
SciCheck Digest
Southwest Airlines’ flight cancellations fueled partisan claims over the weekend that transportation workers were protesting COVID-19 vaccine requirements and causing the cancellations. But there’s no evidence that workers staged protests. The Federal Aviation Administration, the airline and labor unions have all cited other reasons.
On Sept. 9, President Joe Biden directed the Labor Department to develop a temporary emergency rule for businesses with 100 or more employees that would require workers to be fully vaccinated or be tested at least once a week. The administration says the rule would affect an estimated 80 million private-sector workers.
Some experts have said the vaccine requirement is legal under the Occupational Safety and Health Act. The law says the secretary of labor can issue “an emergency temporary standard,” or ETS, if “employees are exposed to grave danger from exposure to substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful or from new hazards” and “that such emergency standard is necessary to protect employees from such danger.”
But the act hasn’t been used to implement vaccine requirements before, and legal challenges are expected.
“I think it’s a legitimate emergency standard in response to a legitimate emergency,”, a professor of law and health management and policy at Drexel University, told us. Field said he did not believe there had been a legal test of a requirement like this before. But, he said, it was “within OSHA’s power.” (For more, see “.”)
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