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Australia and Japan Strengthen Defence Cooperation Amid Rising Regional Tensions 
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The Supreme Court heard a lawsuit regarding the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates on private businesses and ruled against the administration. Following the ruling, the administration has withdrawn the mandate.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration announced the withdrawal of the vaccine mandate on private businesses with 100 or more employees. Despite withdrawing the mandate, the agency strongly urged private businesses to make sure their employees are vaccinated to protect them from the risks posed by COVID-19.
This month, the Supreme Court ruled against implementing vaccine mandates on private businesses with 100 or more employees. However, the court ruled in favor of the administration requiring health workers at facilities receiving federal funds to be inoculated against COVID-19.
Biden announced back in September 2021 that he was to make vaccinations compulsory at large private businesses as the country hit the death toll of over 850,000 from the pandemic.
The Supreme Court cited that the mandate would be an “encroachment” into the lives and the health of employees. The six conservative justices ruled against the mandate while the three liberal justices dissented.
“Although Congress has indisputably given OSHA the power to regulate occupational dangers, it has not given the agency the power to regulate public health more broadly,” the justices said.
The liberal justices, however, said that the ruling “stymies the federal government’s ability to counter the unparalleled threat that COVID-19 poses to our nation’s workers.”
In other related news, Biden signed an executive order Wednesday that would make sexual harassment a crime under the military justice code, addressing an issue that the Pentagon has had difficulty with.
The order, included as a provision under the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, is a tribute to soldier Vanessa Guillen, who was killed by a fellow soldier back in 2020 after being harassed and telling her family that she did not trust the military’s chain of command to follow up on her complaint.
The executive order also aimed to “strengthen the military’s response to domestic violence and the wrongful broadcast or distribution of intimate visual images.”
Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin previously appointed an independent commission to provide recommendations as to how to best address the issue of sexual harassment within the military and how to prosecute perpetrators more effectively. The commission concluded that removing the decision-making ability to prosecute sexual harassment from the military chain of command is the only solution.
