(COLUMBUS, Ohio) — Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost has signed onto a federal lawsuit filed in Louisiana challenging the legality of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to mandate vaccines for healthcare workers.
“We have seen the challenges nursing homes and other facilities have had in retaining and recruiting staff,” Yost said. “This mandate, and the walkouts that will likely follow, will only make those challenges worse– leaving vulnerable Ohioans without adequate care.”
The lawsuit, recently filed in the Western District of Louisiana, seeks to invalidate the federal mandate that impacts about 17 million people across the country working full and part-time at hospitals, nursing facilities, hospices and home health agencies.
This legal action is the latest in a series of steps Attorney General Yost has taken recently to fight illegal overreach by the administration. Yost challenged previous vaccine mandates this month from President Biden by filing two lawsuits in the U.S. Court of Appeals Sixth Circuit challenging a vaccine mandate against federal contractors and another issued for Americans who work at a company with at least 100 employees.
In every suit, Yost has demanded a halt to any vaccine mandate while the cases are litigated.
“It’s an unlawful use of executive power,” Yost said,” The president does not have the authority to make health-care decisions for Americans.”
Yost also contends that the administration is prohibiting sovereign states from enacting and enforcing their own policies in response to the pandemic.
Other legal actions taken by Yost this year to stop federal overreach:
- In March, he sought an injunction after the federal government offered Ohio $5.4 billion in badly needed pandemic assistance with one massive condition – that the state had to agree to unspecified limits on its power to cut taxes. The AG won that case.
- In August, Yost and 17 other states filed suit after two agencies rewrote federal law on sexual discrimination — a responsibility that belongs to Congress. The lawsuit challenges, among other things, that the Department of Education unilaterally expanded Title IX to apply to sexual orientation and gender identity in schools, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission moved to mandate that employers adopt practices regarding pronouns, access to shared bathrooms and other such matters.
- In October, Yost and 19 other states wrote the Treasury Department to oppose a new federal policy that would provide the federal government with access to nearly every American’s bank account and financial transaction information.
Also last month, Yost sued the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to ensure the agency continues public integrity improvements to family planning clinics made in 2019. Those improvements required federally funded family-planning clinics to (1) be physically and financially independent of abortion clinics and (2) refrain from referring patients for abortions.
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