ATLANTA — Georgia's attorney general, Chris Carr, said Saturday that a lawsuit the state is part of won an injunction against Biden administration rules for a mask and vaccine mandate with the Head Start federal educational program.
The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services instituted the mandate for educators, volunteers and contractors who work with Head Start funded programs and services at the end of November.
Georgia joined a lawsuit with 23 other states, led by Louisiana, on Dec. 21. A federal judge in Louisiana issued a temporary injunction blocking the policy on Saturday, according to Carr.
"In response to our lawsuit, a federal court in (Louisiana) has temporarily stopped the vaccine and masking mandate for Head Start programs in (Georgia) and 23 other states. In part, this mandate would have required that Head Start students two years and older be masked effective immediately," Carr tweeted.
This lawsuit is the most recent of four that Georgia has either initiated or joined in challenging vaccine mandate policies instituted by federal agencies under the Biden administration.
Georgia's Republican leadership, including Gov. Brian Kemp and Carr, have argued the Biden policies are overreaching, "illegal" uses of federal bureaucratic rulemaking.
The results in court so far have been mixed, previously with a federal appeals court in Ohio dissolving another federal appeals court's ruling that had one of the policies, a mandate for employees of companies with 100 or more workers to either get tested weekly or get vaccinated, on hold. With that policy now moving forward, companies - and their employees - reportedly have until Jan. 10 to be in compliance.
Meanwhile, Georgia recently gained a legal victory in one of the other lawsuits, concerning a mandate for federal contractors, and a partial victory in another of the lawsuits against a mandate for healthcare workers.
So far these cases have concerned stays and injunctions against the mandates - their rulings are not on whether they are fundamentally legal or not, but rather whether or not they should be allowed to temporarily be in place while the courts consider the fundamental cases.
According to the Georgia Attorney General's Office, the Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on Jan. 7 in the lawsuits involving the mandates for healthcare workers and businesses with 100 or more employees.