The Supreme Court and vaccine mandates: Three questions

The Supreme Court on Thursday prevented the Biden administration from enforcing its mandate that employees of large firms must be vaccinated against COVID-19 or regularly test for the virus.

The move effectively ends the government’s most ambitious attempt to counter rising COVID-19 cases by pushing unvaccinated Americans to get shots. The vaccine-or-test requirement, issued by the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration, would have covered 84 million people, according to OSHA figures.

At the same time the administration to proceed with a smaller Department of Health and Human Services mandate that requires most health care workers at facilities that receive federal money to be vaccinated. This rule would cover about