Buckeye Institute Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE January 3, 2022 Lisa Gates, Vice President of Communications, (614) 224-3255 The Buckeye Institute Files Brief Requesting U.S. Supreme Court to Immediately Stay OSHA Vaccine Mandate Columbus, OH – On Monday, The Buckeye Institute filed its reply brief in the Supreme Court of the United States outlining why an emergency stay is urgently needed in Buckeye’s OSHA vaccine mandate case—Phillips v. OSHA. Oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court on the question of an emergency stay of the vaccine mandate are set for Friday, January 7.   “The Buckeye Institute’s clients have clearly demonstrated that they will suffer irreparable and immediate economic harm if the OSHA vaccine mandate is allowed to be enforced,” said Robert Alt, president and chief executive officer of The Buckeye Institute and a lead attorney representing Phillips Manufacturing & Tower Company and Sixarp LLC against the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) vaccine mandate. “If the court does not act immediately to halt the vaccine mandate’s implementation, these companies will be compelled to comply with this unlawful requirement and forced to implement expensive policies and practices that will threaten their businesses, expose them to penalties for noncompliance, and cost them qualified, well-trained, good employees at a time when they are already suffering a labor shortage.”   Facing a dire worker shortage, Phillips Manufacturing & Tower Company would lose nearly one-fifth of its existing employees if the OSHA vaccine mandate were enforced. Analysis indicates that enforcing this vaccine mandate would cost the company nearly $1 million annually in recruiting, training, additional overtime, and other costs. These costs do not factor in the harm the resulting labor shortage would do to Phillips’s ability to meet its contractual production requirements, which would cost Phillips $25,000 per hour that the purchaser is without the Phillips product.   Sixarp is likewise suffering a labor shortage, with more than 30 open positions at its Grand Rapids and other packaging facilities. As a provider of packaging for products including over-the-counter and prescription pharmaceuticals, Sixarp is a critical component of the U.S. supply chain that is already stretched to its limits, which the vaccine mandate would significantly exacerbate.   The Buckeye Institute was the first to complete filing with the U.S. Supreme Court requesting an emergency stay of the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate—Buckeye filed its hard copy materials less than an hour after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit’s decision came down granting the government’s request to dissolve the existing administrative stay.   Buckeye’s co-counsel in the case are Patrick Strawbridge, Jeffrey M. Harris, and Daniel Shapiro at Consovoy McCarthy PLLC. # # # Founded in 1989, The Buckeye Institute is an independent research and educational institution – a think tank – whose mission is to advance free-market public policy in the states. The Buckeye Institute is a non-partisan, non-profit, and tax-exempt organization, as defined by section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue code. As such, it relies on support from individuals, corporations, and foundations that share a commitment to individual liberty, free enterprise, personal responsibility, and limited government. The Buckeye Institute does not seek or accept government funding. Donate Today! Support The Buckeye Institute Support The Buckeye Institute by setting us as your designated charity through AmazonSmile. Every time you make a purchase, Amazon will donate 0.5% of the total to The Buckeye Institute at no extra cost to you! AmazonSmile and the AmazonSmile logo are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

 

Press Release from the Buckeye Institue

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE December 1, 2021 Lisa Gates, Vice President of Communications, (614) 224-3255

The Buckeye Institute Files Motion Demanding White House Stop Hiding Documents in OSHA Vaccine Mandate Case Columbus, OH – On Wednesday, The Buckeye Institute filed a motion with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit on behalf of its clients, Phillips Manufacturing & Tower Company and Sixarp LLC, demanding that the White House produce all communications and records regarding the initiation and development of President Biden’s vaccine mandate.   “The White House must include ALL communications related to its justification for the OSHA vaccine mandate in the record—as opposed to providing only the pretextual justification that OSHA manufactured in anticipation of this legal case,” said Robert Alt, president and chief executive officer of The Buckeye Institute and counsel of record representing Phillips Manufacturing & Tower Company and Sixarp LLC against the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) vaccine mandate.   As outlined in The Buckeye Institute’s motion, the White House has been perfectly clear that it imposed the vaccine mandate through OSHA in order to circumvent limits on federal power, and that its true intent is not related to genuine concern for workplace safety, but is rather to increase individual vaccination rates writ large. Because this rationale would constitute an impermissible basis for any OSHA rule, OSHA produced a pretextual record, making no mention of the White House’s publicly-stated purpose of increasing individual vaccination rates. The White House then failed to include documents about its stated justification for the mandate in the official record it submitted to the court.   With Phillips v. U.S. Department of Labor, The Buckeye Institute was the first organization to file a motion for emergency stay with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. The Buckeye Institute’s co-counsel in this case are Patrick Strawbridge, Jeffrey M. Harris, and Daniel Shapiro at Consovoy McCarthy PLLC. # # #

Founded in 1989, The Buckeye Institute is an independent research and educational institution – a think tank – whose mission is to advance free-market public policy in the states. The Buckeye Institute is a non-partisan, non-profit, and tax-exempt organization, as defined by section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue code. As such, it relies on support from individuals, corporations, and foundations that share a commitment to individual liberty, free enterprise, personal responsibility, and limited government. The Buckeye Institute does not seek or accept government funding.

Donate Today! Support The Buckeye Institute

Support The Buckeye Institute by setting us as your designated charity through AmazonSmile. Every time you make a purchase, Amazon will donate 0.5% of the total to The Buckeye Institute at no extra cost to you! AmazonSmile and the AmazonSmile logo are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates.

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Vaccine Mandates – What’s the End Game?

November 9, 2021 By Brian C. Joondeph, M.D.

Once upon a time President Joe Biden was against vaccine mandates. As president-elect in December 2020, he was asked, "Do you want vaccines to be mandatory?" His answer at the time seemed clear, "No I don't think it should be mandatory, I wouldn't demand it be mandatory." But that was then, and this is now.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi agreed.

Last April, when asked about vaccine mandates, she made her position clear, "So—so here is the thing. We are—we cannot require someone to be vaccinated. That's just not what we can do. It is a matter of privacy to know who is or who isn't."

Yet here we are, with Big Brother issuing this new edict,

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has issued an emergency temporary standard (ETS) to minimize the risk of COVID-19 transmission in the workplace. The ETS establishes binding requirements to protect unvaccinated employees of large employers (100 or more employees from the risk of contracting COVID-19 in the workplace.

Their rationale is to protect workers from themselves, “Unvaccinated workers are much more likely to contract and transmit COVID-19 in the workplace than vaccinated workers.” 

 Maybe, or maybe not.   

According to CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky in August, “Vaccines no longer prevent you from spreading COVID.”  This leads to several questions, which the corporate media seems uninterested in exploring or asking.........To Read More.....

Vax mandate ‘work-around’ using OSHA not nearly as clever as they thought

September 16, 2021  By Thomas Lifson

The plan to force Americans into receiving an experimental drug that acts on their RNA faced some big obstacles, including  Joe Biden's promise that he wouldn't do it; decades of Democrats' rhetoric over "my body, my choice"; and the CDC's admission that it lacks the power to do so.

But Biden's chief of staff, Ron Klain [i], seems to think of himself as a pretty smart fellow, a guy who gets things done.  Maybe that's why he exulted over the approach the administration is taking to force Americans to inject the experimental gene therapy into their bodies.  He retweeted MSNBC's Stephanie Ruehl, saying, "OSHA doing this vaxx mandate as an emergency workplace safety rule is the ultimate work-around for the Federal govt to require vaccinations."

"Work-around" has such a nice bureaucratic insider ring to it.  It bespeaks a command of the intricacies of government, the details of rules, regulations, and precedents, and a mastery of the incredibly complex organization.

But it turns out that "working around" by piling responsibilities on OSHA (The Occupational Safety and Health Administration), part of the Department of Labor, overlooked a small problem: OSHA is incapable of handling the responsibility.  ..............

There are many avenues for legal challenges to the mandate, including the question of whether an illness with a 99%+ recovery rate for anyone of working age constitutes an "emergency" sufficient to cancel the "right" to "privacy" that the SCOTUS proclaimed resided in the penumbra of the Constitution.  Find the right federal judge(s), and the mandate can be tied up for years in the courts.  As the lawyer quoted above said, "ideas are simple, execution is hard."...........To Read More...

 

When it comes to vaccine mandates, Biden is counting on OSHA

September 12, 2021  By Joe Strader

On his first day as in the White House, Joe Biden signed an executive order giving OSHA broad power to regulate health and safety in the workplace, particularly regarding COVID-19. At the time, it was thought that OSHA would enforce face coverings in the workplace.

On Thursday, President Biden announced that companies with more than 100 employees are required to make certain that all employees are vaccinated or have a weekly negative COVID test. This broad power may indeed be unconstitutional, but OSHA is ideally suited to try to enforce the mandate.

Most people know that OSHA creates detailed rules governing workplaces. These rules have been enforced using intrusively detailed onsite inspections. A COVID vaccination rule under this model would be quite difficult to enforce in person.  However, the way OSHA enforces rules has changed.

OSHA now relies on detailed reports from employers rather than onsite inspections. Only if an employer has an increase in accidents or workplace illnesses, would OSHA look more closely at the operation. Problems such as deaths or serious injuries might generate an onsite inspection.  State OSHA departments do much of the actual onsite work in cooperation with federal OSHA.............To Read More....

 

Keeping Track Of Toxic Exposure

January 28, 2019 By Michael D. Shaw @ HealthNewsDigest.com       

Environmental Factors, Regulatory activities | Permalink | Comments (0)      

 

It was William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, aka Lord Kelvin who said, “When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts advanced to the stage of science.”
Few would argue with his contention, and these days we have in place countless measuring devices deployed in every conceivable environment. Ever since I was a student, it was understood that temperature was the most measured variable. But, one wonders…is that still true? How many millions of people frequently test their blood glucose; how many millions of websites measure their traffic every day?

In the world of public health, starting around 100 years ago, and then being energized by the creation of agencies such as EPA and OSHA, monitoring of exposure to air contaminants occurs now in virtually every country. In the US, OSHA promulgates Permissible Exposure Limits for more than 500 substances. Additional standards are published by other agencies and non-governmental organizations.

Per 29 CFR 1910.1000(a)(2), these PELs–for the most part–are based on an 8-hour time-weighted average of the worker’s exposure to the substance. Thus, not only must the concentrations be measured, but the data must be archived and processed such that the appropriate average is calculated.

But here’s the problem. The PELs date back to the early days of OSHA, founded in 1971. Even then, measuring instruments did exist for some of the specified substances. And, virtually all of them were provided with an output that–in theory–could be captured by some sort of recording device. Microcomputers were still a decade away. Expensive data loggers would be introduced in the early 1970s, but did not see widespread usage in the occupational health market.

As a consequence, before the advent of microprocessors, most 8-hour averages were based on wet chemical analytical methods, whereby an air sample is collected over a period of time, and this “single number” concentration–thus determined–became the average. However, no time history was available, and even though this average might be below the PEL, there may have been episodes of high exposure, that were literally averaged out. For many substances, in addition to the PEL, there are also limits on short-term exposure.

Before microcomputers, if an occupancy had continuous gas detection instruments installed, which provided instantaneous readings–along with user-adjustable alarms–OSHA did not press too hard on the 8-hour average matter. Besides, many companies also had wet chemical analysis reports on file for the analytes in question.

In 1984, Interscan introduced the DOS version of its Arc-Max^® package–one of the first data acquisition products intended to support PEL compliance. The first customers were in the healthcare field, mostly involving applications for monitoring ethylene oxide, a sterilant.

There have been many updates to Arc-Max since then, and it is still a popular product, providing data acquisition, archiving, and reporting to a long list of end-users.

For many years, software packages such as Arc-Max have traditionally been deployed on local or networked computers, with true Cloud data logging being the rare exception. The advantage of a Web-based program is that users can “watch their sensors on their phone,” or any other compatible device. While such packages exist, they are usually costly and proprietary, in that they are not easily open to any sensor.

Interscan is now alpha testing a Web-based package that will accommodate any sensor with a standard output, and will support most communications protocols. The beta testing will involve end-users in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries. Sensor data is ported to a platform hosted at Amazon Web Services, with various levels of access available. Averaging and trending are calculated in the Cloud, with the report dashboard available at a Web portal.
More information on this new package will be released as available.