City Council Votes On COVID Vaccine Mandate

CHENEY – On Monday Jan. 10 the city council decided how they will handle a COVID-19 vaccine mandate issued by OSHA. Resolution E-959 was approved with a vote of six to one. Jill Weiszmann was the one person who voted against Resolution E-959. Mark Posthuma ended up voting yes, but was divided on the resolution’s scope regarding the vaccination status of future employees. He ultimately voted to approve the resolution despite his clear opposition to the resolution’s portion regarding future employee’s vaccination status.

Resolution E-959 essentially requires all city employees to either be fully vaccinated or submit to weekly COVID testing in accordance to the OSHA COVID-19 testing ETS.

Originally the council was set to vote on the mandate last week during the regularly scheduled meeting on Jan. 4. The council elected to delay the vote to an emergency meeting on Jan. 10 because they wanted to see how the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) would handle the oral arguments regarding OSHA’s testing ETS.

Well, the supreme court did debate the efficacy of OSHA’s testing ETS and it appears there is some hesitancy around the ETS’s broad reach and if OSHA has the authority to enforce emergency actions like a COVID-19 vaccine or testing mandate. Law experts believe there is a good chance the SCOTUS could put a stay on the testing ETS but the city council wanted to act now.

The topic of the ETS being unlawful was brought up but the council wanted to limit the discussion of resolution-E 959’s compliance with OSHA’s ETS regardless of if the SCOTUS deems the entire thing unlawful when they finally make a ruling decision.

Resolution E-959’s scope was the biggest debate amongst the council regarding if future employees must be vaccinated to be considered for employment but they ultimately decided that future employees would have to submit to the same ETS standards as current employees.

Mark Posthuma doesn’t believe that future employees shouldn’t have to be vaccinated as a factor for employment and it was his biggest hang up over the whole resolution. Posthuma also brought up several other details for the council’s consideration. When it comes to testing, Posthuma didn’t believe it would be a financial burden on the city to do regular testing because of the testing companies that the city is going to start working with in the near future. These companies will bring mobile units and offer free testing to the community.

Posthuma said he also spoke to health care professionals that noted to him that the omicron variant is spreading through vaccinated people at the same rate as unvaccinated people and stated that vaccine protection against omicron is scant after six months. These health care professionals told Posthuma that if the health and safety of city employees is the goal of resolution E-959 – then every employee, vaccinated or not, should have to submit for regular testing. The council decided that making vaccinated employees submit for mandatory testing goes above and beyond OSHA’s ETS and they didn’t want to overreach anymore than they have to. However, they were welcome to the idea of vaccinated employees voluntarily submitting for regular testing.

Posthuma also pointed out that the COVID-19 vaccine related deaths are sky high compared to other vaccines. There have been over 18,00 deaths related to complications from the COVID-19 vaccine according to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). Posthuma told his fellow council-members that it’s not fair to compare the COVID-19 vaccine to other vaccines in regards to allowing religious exemptions. Forcing people to get the COVID vaccine if they’ve already had other types of vaccines like an influenza vaccine which has an extremely low instance of adverse events isn’t something that makes sense when you look at the science, data, and statistics.

The council wanted to make sure the document is “living and breathing” to ensure this policy can be quickly modified in the future as this situation keeps changing and evolving.