BATON ROUGE, La. (KLFY) — A lawsuit filed by Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry has put a halt to some federal vaccine mandates.
Last week, Landry filed two lawsuits.
The first suit was filed on Thursday. That lawsuit was against President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for federal employees and federal contractors.
On Friday, Landry filed another suit against the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s vaccine mandate for businesses with at least 100 employees.
A federal court decided to halt one of those vaccine mandates.
Over the weekend, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals put a halt on OSHA’s vaccine mandate for businesses with at least 100 employees.
The panel of judges said the lawsuit gave them “cause to believe there are grave statutory and constitutional issues with the mandate.”
“A three-judge panel of the fifth circuit basically said, ‘Wait. Timeout, government. You cannot implement this emergency rule. We need to know more,'” Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry said.
Landry says the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals put OSHA’s vaccine mandate for large businesses on pause after reviewing the lawsuits.
“I think that they saw our petition and the petition of other business owners out there, and they said, ‘Woah, wait a minute. This is a vast overreach by the federal government,'” Landry added.
He says that means the mandate is paused.
“That rule is absolutely paused. It’s frozen,” he explained.
Right now, businesses with at least 100 employees don’t have to comply with the vaccine mandate, a mandate that Landry says would have cost Louisiana billions of dollars in lost revenue.
“We already have a disruption in the workplace to begin with. This only exacerbates that problem,” he told News Ten.
He says a vaccine mandate is something every state should individually decide to implement, not the federal government.
Landry says the lawsuits are Louisiana’s way of pushing back against what he believes is an intrusion by the federal government into things that affect jobs and businesses and people’s daily lives.
“This is where the government is getting in between you and your doctor’s healthcare choices, what’s best for you, and that’s why it’s problematic,” he said.
He says he hopes the lawsuits he and other states have filed will stop other unconstitutional vaccine mandates.
“We hope to see the federal courts place the president in check and say, ‘You have overreached, and if this is something you want to put in place, you’re going to have to go see congress,'” Landry said.
Landry says he has a third lawsuit in the works right now against the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, who recently announced a vaccine mandate for anyone who receives Medicare or Medicaid funding.
He hopes to file that lawsuit in the next seven days.
