Ivey joins AG Marshall in federal lawsuit opposing vaccine mandates

gov. kay ivey

Gov. Kay Ivey, shown here during an Oct. 18, 2021 visit to Huntsville, announced she has joined a lawsuit opposing the COVID vaccine mandate on Oct. 30, 2021. (Paul Gattis | pgattis@al.com)

Gov. Kay Ivey announced Saturday she has joined a federal lawsuit with several other states to block President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall announced Friday night his office was joining the lawsuit. The Alabama Department of Public Health, Alabama Department of Rehabilitation Services and Alabama Department of Agriculture and Industries have also filed as plaintiffs.

  • The lawsuit can be read at the bottom of the story.

The pushback from state leaders was expected over what they have described as a federal government overreach in requiring federal contractors to get inoculated in an effort to end the coronavirus pandemic.

“I have joined a lawsuit to fight back against the outrageous, overreaching Biden vaccine mandates,” Ivey said in a statement Saturday. “From the moment the White House tried to force this vaccine on to Americans, I have said that Alabama is standing strong against it and that the best way to stop this is to go to the courts. I am proud to take this important step and join Georgia and other states to pursue the most effective legal path to stop this vaccine mandate dead in its tracks. Alabamians are overwhelmingly against these egregious, overreaching federal mandates, and I stand firmly with them.”

Alabama has joined the states of Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, South Carolina, Utah and West Virginia in the lawsuit. All but Kansas have Republican governors. The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Georgia.

Ten other states Republican-led states on Friday filed a separate lawsuit against Biden seeking to stop the mandate and Republican-led Florida filed a lawsuit on Thursday.

The New York Times and ABC News have reported that legal experts have indicated the lawsuits will likely fail. The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday declined to block a vaccine mandate instituted by the state of Maine for health care workers. Some workers objected because they were not excused from the mandate after citing religious liberty rights.

Biden has said he will require companies with 100 or more employees to receive the vaccine, though the formal order has yet to be issued. Some companies have already told employees to get the shots and those who did not have said they were terminated.

“Biden has again demonstrated open disdain for the rule of law in seizing power Congress never gave him,” Marshall said in a statement. “And all to impose a mandate that threatens to further wreck our economy and people’s lives by denying countless workers the ability to feed their families simply for daring to oppose this get-jabbed-or-get-fired dictate.

“Within the last 10 days, the Biden administration informed a number of Alabama state agencies and institutions that they are subject to his federal-contractor vaccine mandate and must, therefore, force their employees to be vaccinated. This order was strategically designed with an unreasonable timetable to exert maximum coercive pressure on states—such that they are faced with either vaccinating a large percentage of their public and private workforces in a matter of weeks, or else they are barred from contracting with the federal government.”

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