Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., said Thursday she “deeply rejects” President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for large businesses.
The mandate is scheduled to take effect Jan. 4, Biden said Thursday, and impacts businesses with 100 or more employees. It is administered through OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) and employees will either have to be fully vaccinated or tested weekly for Covid-19 and wear a mask at work.
“I don’t want the government telling private businesses the parameters they should use (for getting their employees vaccinated),” Capito said during a virtual press conference.
“I am very much pro vaccination,” she said, and it is sometimes difficult to understand why a person would refuse to get vaccinated, other than when medical issues may preclude it.
Capito said the mandate affects 84 million Americans.
“Let’s get real here,” she said. “We are going to lose people out of the workforce in droves because for one reason or another they are not going to get vaccinated.”
This also comes as the workforce is in shorter supply, and that would get worse with the mandate.
“Only 38 percent of truck drivers are vaccinated and could lose their jobs,” she said, adding that many “are just not going to do it” (get vaccinated).
Capito said if a business wants to require the vaccinations, it’s up to the business, as it should be, and some do while others offer incentives or an alternative testing requirement and even impose penalties ($200 a month taken out for insurance) for employees who refuse to get vaccinated.
“We have got to get some flexibility in this,” she said of allowing businesses to make their own decisions.
Capito said mandates can be counterproductive because they make people even more determined not to get them because they don’t want to be told what to do and end up getting no gains from it, only losses.
“I am hoping we can work with some of our colleagues to take that rule down,” she said. “I know for certain it will be challenged in court.”
Virginia Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-9th District, issued a related statement Thursday because the mandate applies to employees of facilities participating in Medicare and Medicaid.
“Rural health care systems already have trouble recruiting and retaining workers,” he said. “The vaccine mandate rolled out today by President Biden will only add to the burdens carried by hospitals in rural areas.”
Capito said individuals should have a right to make their own decisions about the vaccine as well, although with 90 percent of deaths among the unvaccinated, “that is enough to make me go get vaccinated.”
Although she doesn’t support “the line of thinking” against the vaccine, in the end it should be “a private decision” and an “American right.”
Trying to force people may only “harden their resolve” against it, she added.