Joe Biden announced on September 9 that he would be pushing vaccine mandates for all federal employees, federal contractors and then he was going to impose an OSHA rule on private companies with more than 100 employees that they had to be vaccinated as well, although they would have a testing option.

The federal contractor mandate deadline had been set for Dec. 8 which has caused massive protests from employees who work for federal contractors.

But now, in the wake of the red wave in the elections — notice the timing — Biden has suddenly decided that doesn’t need to happen as urgently as he claimed.

According to Politico:

The administration released two new rules on Thursday that will be enforced starting Jan. 4 — one setting up new vaccination-or-test requirements for businesses with more than 100 workers and another implementing a vaccine mandate for health care workers at facilities participating in Medicare and Medicaid. Together, the rules are expected to affect over 1 million workers.

Officials also said the administration is pushing back the Dec. 8 deadline for federal contractors to ensure their workers are fully vaccinated, so that all three mandates will go into effect on Jan. 4.

Under the rules, workers at private businesses with more than 100 employees will have the option to wear a mask at work and submit to weekly Covid-19 testing in lieu of getting vaccinated. Health care workers and government contractors do not have the testing option.

I wrote earlier how the elections were a sign to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca) that her Build Back Better agenda was toast. They also appear to have been a sign for Biden that he needed to back off a little.

Obviously, he still intends to put the mandates into effect, so I’m not sure how much he thinks this buys him. It surely wouldn’t stop the anger against him, the protests, or the “Let’s go, Brandon” chants. When you’re having a viral movement against your actions, you may just want to consider what the heck you’re doing.

At this point, the Democrats have to be spooked by all the anger they’ve caused and how they seemed to lose in a wave this week. Is he actually reassessing this with any thought? Probably not, because if he were, he would be pulling the mandates altogether. But he does know he’s in trouble.