Senator Bruce Anderson (R-Buffalo) responded to President Joe Biden’s sweeping mandates on employers and employees with concern and outrage. The mandates require businesses to track vaccine status and require testing for unvaccinated workers, with significant fines for businesses that don’t comply.

“Not only are the President’s mandates unreasonable, but they are also unenforceable,” Anderson said. “Minnesota businesses are beginning to bounce back from the last 18 months and now the federal government tasks them with monitoring their employees’ private health data – it’s simply unconscionable. We want to recover from the pandemic, not create even more barriers to that recovery.”

• According to a tweet from Minnesota DEED Commissioner Steve Grove, the changes would affect 4,800 businesses and 1.4 million workers in Minnesota.
• The Minnesota Nurses Union responded to the mandate saying, “We question the timing of the impending vaccine mandates and believe these mandates will continue to exacerbate staffing shortages.”
• KSTP reported Patti Cullen, President and CEO of Care Providers, a statewide association for nursing homes, said, “We are totally vaccine supportive, but we already have a chronic workforce crisis in our communities. I think the repercussions are really serious for us,” after Biden imposed a federal mandate for nursing home employees to be vaccinated in August.
• Education Minnesota asked for policy decisions on vaccination be made at a local level in August in a statement that said, “vaccination policies with the goal of persuading nearly all adults in schools to get vaccinated while accommodating the small number of educators who have valid medical or religious reasons for not receiving a COVID-19 vaccine.”