DeSantis vows to fight federal vaccine mandate: It’s ‘going down’

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on Thursday vowed to fight President Biden’s federal COVID-19 vaccine mandate, saying that the rule is “going down.”

DeSantis promised during a news conference in Jacksonville, Fla., that the state will contest the rule “immediately,” according to a local NBC News affiliate station.

“Florida will be responding, and I think the rule’s going down, I just don’t think that there’s an adequate basis for it, and I think you’ve even seen people on their side acknowledge that they don’t have firm constitutional footing for this,” DeSantis said.

Earlier this year Biden issued an executive order requiring businesses with 100 employees or more to require their workers to get COVID-19 vaccines or undergo weekly testing. Companies that do not comply with the mandate are set to be fined up to $14,000 per violation, NBC Miami noted.

DeSantis on Thursday pushed back on the Biden administration’s urgency to implement the rule, which is set to go into effect Jan. 4.

“They’re saying this is an imminent danger, it’s gotta be an emergency rule, these people have been working this whole time, they’ve been working for a year and a half. They announced that they were gonna do this in September, it took them six weeks to write the rule and it doesn’t go into effect until January?” DeSantis said. “They’re abusing emergency power to be able to do what they would not be able to get through the Congress and do in a constitutional way.”

Last month, DeSantis sued the Biden administration over its COVID-19 vaccine mandates for federal contractors. At the time, he blasted Biden’s pandemic response as a “radical intrusion on the personal autonomy of American workers.”

“It’s important for us to take a stand,” DeSantis said then. “Tossing people aside is just not something we can tolerate here in the state of Florida, so we are going to do everything we can.”