“It’s not as if you can replace these people overnight,” says Kash Patel. “What’s Joe Biden going to do? Eliminate the tip of the spear of the United States military?”
In this episode, we discuss the growing challenges to vaccine mandates, from the Special Forces to law enforcement. “We’re talking about hundreds if not thousands of people across the country.”
Below is a rush transcript of this Kash’s Corner episode from Oct 15, 2021. This transcript may not be in its final form and may be updated.
Kash Patel: Hey, everybody. And welcome back to Kash’s Corner.
Jan Jekielek: I think on everybody’s mind these days are vaccine mandates. President Biden has issued, I think, back in September 9th, the vaccine mandates for the workplace, any workplace over a 100 people. People are going to need to be vaccinated or get weekly testing, as I understand it.
Now, just recently, we have Governor Abbott, who’s issued a counter mandate, if you will, the vaccine mandates, there’s no business in Texas that can do that. A lot of questions on people’s minds, what does this mean? Which one is actually going to hold true? How’s this going to work?
Mr. Patel: Well, if I could predict that with any degree of certainty, I should just go play the Lato. But I’ll lay out what I think is the legal groundwork for it, and then where it’s heading in that specific area of states versus federal.
So there’s this Act, OSHA, O-S-H-A regarding health across the country. It’s a federal statute, federal law. So applies across the country that President Biden used to both write his executive order, and the Act itself is the mechanism by which they’re supposed to implement it, if they’re following the Act.
And what the federal law says, is that, and this is a simplification of it, if there is a grave health concern, then under this OSHA Act, the president through OSHA can regulate certain sectors of American industry. Let’s call it from coast to coast. If there’s a grave health danger.
So the question that hasn’t been answered, because COVID, it is two years old, but it hasn’t been determined by any federal court, whether or not COVID, the virus, is a grave health concern under the OSHA Federal Act. And so that’s the question that the federal court, a judge is going to have to answer.
And here’s what I predict on that front. As our viewers know, federal judges sit across the country, and then the country is sort of split up into different circuits, as what we call it, numbered circuits, regions. And so those federal circuits don’t necessarily have the same exact law as the next one.
And as you go up the appellate system, from the district court to the circuit court of appeals, then you have the Supreme Court, who decides the law for the country.
And on an important legislation and important executive orders like this one, I suspect this is going to go up to the Supreme Court pretty quickly, because there will probably be different appellate courts throughout the country that decide differently on whether or not COVID is a grave health concern under OSHA, so that President Biden can enact his executive order, which I think we’ll get to here.
Mr. Jekielek: So there’s a lot of nuance here. I mean, this is really fascinating. Because, for example, I think for the first time, that I’m aware of, The New York Times actually published and talked about in a very prominent article, the basically age distribution of deaths, the age distribution of risk effectively for COVID.
And so on the very low end, very young people are at very, very minimal risk. Unvaccinated young kids, and so forth, extremely low risk. According to these tables. Actually this data has been replicated, has been around for a very long time, whereas people on the high end, 70 plus and so forth, are actually at significantly higher risk.
So you’re talking about something that is a broad application across everybody. I’m not a medical doctor, but from what the data says, the risk is just so tiny to young people and significant to older people.
Mr. Patel: That’s a great distinction, because the Act just says, is X a grave health concern, right? It doesn’t say, is it a grave health concern for this group, and this group, or this age bracket, or this region of the country, it just says grave health concern.
So that’s a great point that I’m sure people are going to have to grapple with, because if you’re, and I’m just making stuff up here for purposes of example, but if you’re under 40 years old and the statistics show that your chances of dying from COVID are very, very low, then it’s going to be hard for the Biden administration to go in a federal court and say, it’s a grave health concern.
Now, the flip side is, maybe they’ll go into federal court and use statistics that say, if you’re over 50 and you get COVID, your chances of dying go up. I don’t know the stats off the top of my head, but those are the types of arguments they’re going to have to make. Now-
Mr. Jekielek: There’s a thousand fold difference, basically, across the spectrum.
Mr. Patel: I didn’t know that. So that’s going to be very… If I were a federal judge, I would say, how can you say under OSHA that COVID is a grave health risk if the scale is, as you say, a thousand fold different. It might be a grave health concern for this end of the scale, but what about 75% on down to zero? If it’s not, then how do they meet that standard..
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