photo by: Screen capture/Kansas Reflector

U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran and the four other Kansas Republicans in Congress registered opposition to federal COVID-19 vaccination mandates applicable to businesses with more than 100 employees.

TOPEKA — Kansas Republicans serving in Congress continued to raise objections Friday to the COVID-19 vaccination mandate rolled out by President Joe Biden, which applies nationwide to private businesses with at least 100 employees.

The five GOP members in the delegation raised constitutional objections to requiring millions of people to be vaccinated and argued that decisions about medical care ought to be left to individuals. They’ve also expressed displeasure with Biden’s vaccination order aimed at employees and contractors of the federal government.

U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran, of Manhattan, joined dozens of senators in a procedural effort to nullify Biden’s vaccine mandate for private employees under a process allowing Congress to challenge executive branch regulations.

“The decision to get vaccinated should be left to each individual in consultation with doctors they trust,” Moran said. “I ask the president to eliminate this mandate and let the decisions be made back home, between employee and employer.”

Under the rule issued Thursday by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, an estimated 84 million American people working at companies with at least 100 employees must be fully vaccinated by Jan. 4 or test negative for COVID-19 on a weekly basis.

A separate rule released from the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services mandated that health care workers be vaccinated by Jan. 4, but those 17 million people staffing health facilities that receive federal funding from Medicaid or Medicare won’t have the option of weekly testing.

“Together, these rules will cover about 100 million Americans — two-thirds of all workers in America,” Biden said in a statement from the White House. “As we’ve seen with businesses large and small across all sectors of our economy, the overwhelming majority of Americans choose to get vaccinated. There have been no ‘mass firings’ and worker shortages because of vaccination requirements. Despite what some predicted and falsely assert, vaccination requirements have broad public support.”

Biden ordered federal government employees to be vaccinated by Nov. 22 and people working at companies contracting with the federal government have until Jan. 4 to complete the vaccination process.

U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall, a physician from Great Bend, said extending vaccination mandates to U.S. employers with more than 100 people on the payroll would disrupt the economy by driving people from jobs, disrupting the supply chain and adding to inflationary pressure. Setting the deadline after the holiday season indicated that Biden understood the vaccination order would cause economic challenges, Marshall said.

“This federal vaccine mandate is unconstitutional and I can’t think of a worse decision for Joe Biden to make right now,” he said.

U.S. Rep. Ron Estes, who serves the 4th District that includes Wichita, said the president was improperly forcing people to choose between getting the vaccine to stay employed or adhering to their personal convictions and losing their job.

“This mandate does not instill confidence in the vaccine, which millions of Americans have freely chosen to take and experience its benefits, but instead it pushes the federal government deeper into the lives of our families and businesses. Regardless of one’s views on the effectiveness of the vaccine, it’s clear this mandate is an overreach of the federal government and should not be implemented,” Estes said.

U.S. Rep. Jake LaTurner, of the 2nd District that includes Topeka, said the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates were an “authoritarian power grab” and that OSHA didn’t have the authority to compel Americans to be vaccinated or to undergo testing. In a similar vein, U.S. Rep. Tracey Mann of western Kansas’ 1st District said the vaccination order for businesses was a “gross misuse” of executive order privileges because it robbed Americans of the right to make health care choices.

U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids, a Democrat serving the 3rd District of Johnson and Wyandotte counties, has been a consistent advocate for voluntary vaccinations along with several GOP members of the Kansas delegation.

— Tim Carpenter reports for Kansas Reflector.