In the health worker case – but not in the workplace case – the court’s majority opinion issued last week agreed that “Covid-19 is highly contagious, dangerous and, especially for Medicare and Medicaid patients a deadly disease.”

One of the dissenting judges, nevertheless, argued that the healthcare mandate was legally questionable because the government didn’t seek public comment before making the sector’s workers choose between keeping their jobs and “an irreversible medical treatment.”

In turning thumbs down on enforcing the workplace mandate that would have affected some 84 million people, the court’s conservative majority said the Biden administration most likely didn’t have the unilateral power to impose a mandate as this would exceed the authority Congress granted the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) when it was established in 1970.

While objecting to the mandate generally, the justices said OSHA retains power to act in workplaces where people are especially susceptible to contagion, such as those with “particularly crowded or cramped environments” or where researchers deal with infectious agents.

Following the high court’s twin decisions, US efforts to deal with the rising number of Covid cases remain beset by uncertainty. Lawsuits brought by business organizations and 27 states against the workplace mandate are still on the dockets, and lawsuits against the vaccine mandate for hospitals receiving funding through the federal health programs Medicare and Medicaid are continuing.

OSHA initially issued the private employer rules in November last year. Several parts of the regulations, including a requirement for mask-wearing in the workplace by unvaccinated individuals, were set to take effect on Jan. 10, while the testing requirements would not have been enforced until February.

Some employers meanwhile are scrambling to set up their own mandates as in particular the Omicron variant of the coronavirus is keeping workers off the job. Some large employers already have mandates. Citibank in October 2021 ordered 70,000 staffers to get vaccinated against Covid or lose their jobs.

In a poll conducted shortly after the Supreme Court opinion, 56% of respondents said employers should require Covid-19 shots, while 33% were opposed. Those aligned with Biden’s Democratic Party were the most likely to back mandates (82%), followed by vaccinated respondents (69%) and remote workers (66%). Only 33% of the opposition Republican Party’s supporters favored the workplace requirements, while 23% of unvaccinated respondents agreed that employers should mandate the shots.