Federal contractor vaccine mandate blocked nationwide

January 2022 employment law letter

Authors:

Todd P. Photopulos, Butler Snow LLP

A federal judge in Georgia issued a nationwide injunction blocking President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for federal contractors in early December. The order was set to take effect on January 4, 2022, and would have affected an estimated 25 percent of the U.S. workforce. About a week before the ruling, a Kentucky federal district court had stopped the federal contractor mandate but only for employers in the states of Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee. The Georgia decision suspended the shot requirement across the country.

How we got here

The Biden administration issued Executive Order 14042 on September 9, 2021, and would have required employees of covered federal contractors to be fully vaccinated by January 18, 2022. To meet the goal, covered employees would have had to take their second COVID-19 vaccine dose (or the Johnson & Johnson single dose) by January 4.

The Georgia court ruling was the latest nationwide judicial block of the Biden administration’s efforts to use employment as a means of requiring vaccination:

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