The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Louisiana on Saturday stopped the new Biden vaccination mandate for large businesses, citing “grave issues.”

The new Biden vaccine order requires any American company with 100 or more employees to mandate vaccinations and would impact about 84 million workers. It is estimated that about thirty million of these 84 million workers are not vaccinated. As part of the order, any worker who refuses to be vaccinated would need to wear a mask indoors and do weekly COVID-19 testing.

The mandate specifically states, “The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is issuing an emergency temporary standard (ETS) to protect unvaccinated employees of large employers (100 or more employees) from the risk of contracting COVID-19 by strongly encouraging vaccination. Covered employers must develop, implement, and enforce a mandatory COVID-19 vaccination policy, with an exception for employers that instead adopt a policy requiring employees to either get vaccinated or elect to undergo regular COVID-19 testing and wear a face covering at work in lieu of vaccination.”

The new temporary stay was decided over the weekend, but its first national deadline for Biden’s vaccine mandate is on the date large businesses with a minimum of 100 employees are supposed to require all unvaccinated staff to wear masks indoors: December 5. However, activation of this order is not required until January 4, 2022.

Reflecting the national split along party lines, with Democrats being for the vaccine order and Republicans against, this new temporary stay by the Louisiana court claims Biden’s mask mandate is unconstitutional.

Reacting to the new Biden mandate, large businesses, religious organizations including churches, other groups, and states such as Texas and Louisiana filed a petition against the new mandate. The petition, filed in the Fifth Circuit in Louisiana, calls the mask mandate for unvaccinated workers a violation of OSHA’s authority and unconstitutional.

Court documents imply the issue of mandating businesses to require workers to be vaccinated or take a weekly test and wear masks should be decided by congress. The suit states, “That is a quintessential legislative act — and one wholly unrelated to the purpose of OSHA itself, which is protecting workplace safety. Nowhere in OSHA’s enabling legislation does Congress confer upon it the power to end pandemics.”

The suit further states President Biden created the new mandate to “set the legislative policy” in order to greatly increase the number of vaccinated American workers in large businesses, and then penalized those unvaccinated workers by creating “binding rules enforced with the threat of large fines.”

Other lawsuits were filed against the Biden mask mandate late last week. A lawsuit against the Biden mandate was filed in the Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in St. Louis by eleven Republican states including Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming. The Democratic office of the Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller participated in the lawsuit as well.

Another lawsuit was filed by the attorneys general of three states, including Republican-held Ohio, Tennessee and Kentucky, to stop the vaccine mandate for federal contractors.

The new vaccination and testing order aka Emergency Testing and Standard Rule, states unvaccinated workers are a threat as likely transmitters of COVID-19 in the workplace. In the rule it states,

“Unvaccinated workers are much more likely to contract and transmit COVID-19 in the workplace than vaccinated workers. OSHA has determined that many employees in the U.S. who are not fully vaccinated against COVID-19 face grave danger from exposure to SARS-CoV-2 in the workplace. This finding of grave danger is based on the severe health consequences associated with exposure to the virus along with evidence demonstrating the transmissibility of the virus in the workplace and the prevalence of infections in employee populations, as discussed in Grave Danger (Section III.A. of this preamble).”

The Fifth Circuit disagreed and stated in their order their decision to block the new regulation based upon the filed petitions that “give cause to believe there are grave statutory and constitutional issues with the mandate” and that the order would be paused “pending further action by this court.”

The CDC reports that as of November 4, “193,227,813 Americans had been fully vaccinated, or 58.2 percent of the country's population.”

Party lines remain a strong indicator of who is getting vaccinated, with Gallup reporting, “forty percent of Republicans “don’t plan” to get vaccinated, versus 26% of Independents and just 3% of Democrats.”