Sonia Sotomayor: Why Can’t OSHA Regulate a Human Body Like a Machine ‘if It’s Spewing a Virus?’

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor compared human beings to machines when commenting in favor of President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for businesses with 100-plus employees on Friday.

“Why is a human being not like a machine if it’s spewing a virus, blood-borne viruses?” Sotomayor asked Scott Keller, the attorney for National Federation of Independent Business, during an expedited Supreme Court hearing regarding the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) coronavirus vaccine mandate.

Sotomayor, who is known as a strident liberal, made the query during an exchange with Keller about whether OSHA requiring businesses to mandate mask wearing as a preventative coronavirus measure is different than OSHA mandating mask wearing when “sparks are flying in the work place.” Keller answered that those machines are presumably “unique to that workplace” before Sotomayor interjected her remark comparing people to machines.

The justice also said the OSHA mandate is not a vaccine mandate because of the masking and testing option.- READ MORE