COLUMBUS, Ohio — When it comes to fighting against COVID-19 health mandates, conservative Ohio lawmakers are taking their efforts a step further.
A new proposed law looks to prohibit mask, vaccine, and testing mandates pretty much everywhere except hospitals or healthcare facilities.
"This is a really, incredibly broad law that is taking aim directly at measures intended to prevent the spread of COVID-19,” said Micah Berman an assistant professor of public health law at Ohio State University.
"Unlike some other bills, this applies very broadly to essentially any, any employer, either public or private, with some limited exceptions, that some pieces of it don't apply to healthcare facilities."
Earlier this month President Joe Biden announced federal vaccine and testing requirements for employers with more than 100 workers.
If HB 425 were to become law, and the federal rule stands to require vaccines or weekly tests in businesses of a certain size, which law do we follow?
For that, we asked Peter Shane, a constitutional and administrative law professor also from Ohio State University.
“So the basic story is this: Federal law under the Constitution takes precedence over state law,” he said.
Even though it's very early in the process, some fear this will tie even more hands in making decisions.
As we have seen with SB 22, which now allows the general assembly to rescind any health mandate by Ohio's executive branch.
"The way that [HB 425] is written to, you know, essentially imply that the COVID vaccines are not fully vetted or that there's some technology in them that we need to be worried about. I think that's just really feeding into dangerous conspiracy theories about these vaccines, but I think it's disappointing to see that coming out of the General Assembly,” said Berman.
We reached out to both sponsors of this bill. Neither returned our request for comment.