Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan grilled an attorney on Friday who was seeking to overturn President Joe Biden's vaccine mandate for workers.
Representing the National Federation of Independent Business, Washington lawyer Scott A. Keller argued against Biden's vaccine or test program administered through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
"Mr. Keller, I guess I just don't see as a situation — you know, a typical arbitrary, capricious situation where we say 'Oh, you didn't consider an alternative carefully enough.' We all know what the best policy is. By this point, two years later, we know that the best way to prevent spread is to get vaccinated. And to prevent dangerous illness and death, is for people to get vaccinated. That is by far the best."
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"The second best is to wear masks. And so this is a policy that says 'we are still confronting thousands of people dying every time we look around and so we are going to put into place the policy we know works best, which is to strongly incentivize vaccination and insist that unvaccinated people will wear masks and test," she explained.
"Why isn't that necessary? What else should be done? It is obviously the policy geared towards preventing the most sickness and death and the agency has done everything but stand on its head to show, quite clearly, that no other policy will prevent sickness and death to anywhere like the degree this one will," she said.
Watch the full exchange below:
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