Doubtless concerns with individual rights (aka selfish behaviours) will trump collective duties (aka altruism), even when the duties involve the protection of the health of co-workers from irresponsible and possibly contagious individuals.
It's the US after all. And judges do love their abstractions, even when a pandemic kills so many people regardless of abstractions. The obvious solution to worrying about setting a precedent is to narrow the precedent to situations involving highly contagious, deadly diseases.
And of course you can't expect a people taught from the cradle that they are free to do what they like to absorb the notion that doing harm to others is a limiting factor. At least, you can't teach the knuckle-draggers among them.
All the same ... it shouldn't have needed a mandate. Wishing to survive is a fundamental expectation of all life-forms. The Republican death cult is a strange sort of politics.
The appeals court will probably lean on the existence of a new pill instead of defining a useful pandemic exception in law.
| 