Gov. Pete Ricketts, R-Neb., on Sunday called the new Biden administration mandates affecting private businesses and federal workers an “egregious outreach.”
In an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Ricketts said GOP governors could take the issue to court, while “working on other strategies” to block the mandates.
“I have been talking to my attorney general,” he said. “He’s coordinating with the other attorneys general across the country who share similar views about the overreach. This is a egregious overreach of federal authority. And as we see with these rules are, we will be able to know exactly how we will be able to challenge them in court.”
According to Ricketts, the COVID-19 shots should be a personal choice.
“It should be a personal health care choice,” he said. “This is not something that the government should mandate and somebody shouldn’t have to make the choice between keeping their job and getting a jab in the arm. It’s just wrong.”
Rickett said he blames the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for fueling the skepticism of the vaccine.
“There’s still a lot of people out there who don’t know what to trust and in fact this is really an outcome of what the CDC has done because they flip-flopped on so many issues whether it’s masks or whether you have to mask, if you’ve been vaccinated and so forth,” he said.
“There’s just a lot of people out there who don’t know who to trust right now. And so by having the government force it on you,— you’re not building the trust.”
Ricketts dismissed the comparison of the COVID-19 vaccines with polio vaccine mandates.
“I think this is very different from polio that has very devastating effects,” he said, adding elderly are the most vulnerable to COVID-19 and they’ve largely been vaccinated.
“So it’s all about balancing off these risks and the risk for this is just such where this is something that we shouldn’t be mandating it,” he declared.
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