The Supreme Court on Friday will hear challenges to President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandates, including his order for more than 10 million health care workers to get COVID-19 vaccine injections. That mandate is being challenged by numerous state attorneys general. This case could be a bellwether on the fate of civil liberties during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Biden administration has consistently portrayed vaccines as a pandemic panacea. In July, Biden promised, “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.” When he announced plans to impose the mandate in a Sept. 9 speech, Biden declared that “there’s only one confirmed positive case per 5,000 fully vaccinated Americans per day. You’re as safe as possible.”

Biden vastly overstated vaccine efficacy in part because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had ceased to count the vast majority of breakthrough infections several months earlier. The Washington Post reported that the CDC’s “overly rosy assessments of the vaccines’ effectiveness against delta … may have lulled Americans into a false sense of security.”

Vaccines will not end this pandemic

More than half a million health care workers have already had COVID-19 infections and more than 99% of them survived. However, the Biden mandate presumes that vaccines are the sole source of good health and protection and ignored post-infection immunity because of perceived “uncertainties … as to the strength and length of (natural) immunity.”

However, a major Israeli study in August found that people who had COVID-19 have far better protection against the delta variant than people who have received multiple COVID-19 vaccine injections.

According to a brief from the states of Missouri and Nebraska, Biden’s mandate “threatens economic ruin and patient harm throughout the (health care) industry” and “will have disastrous consequences on (health care) particularly in rural communities.”

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry derided the Biden administration for giving health care workers a “jab or job” ultimatum.

The Federal Register notice on the new mandate dismissed concerns about the loss of health care staff because “there is insufficient evidence to quantify” the impact.

Across the nation, thousands of health care workers have been fired for refusing to get injected, including many who have natural immunity after surviving COVID-19 infections. In New York, a hospital closed its maternity ward and ceased delivering babies because of a shortage of vaccinated nurses. And one health system is curtailing elective and nonemergency surgeries and reducing radiology treatment in part because of loss of health personnel due to the vaccine mandate.

 Biden responded to shortages of critical personnel by planning to send in 1,000 U.S. military personnel to assist hospitals.

A maddening mandate

In its brief to the Supreme Court, the Biden administration declared that the vaccine mandate was “critical to preventing outbreaks of (COVID-19) that had devastated Medicare- and Medicaid-participating facilities earlier in the pandemic.”

However, two weeks ago, the CDC changed its previous guidance on health care workers isolating after testing positive for COVID-19, and said the quarantine time can be cut further if there are staffing shortages. Now, some COVID-19-positive nurses across the country are being told to come into work and treat patients, even if they still have symptoms.

According to the Biden administration’s policies, it is better for hospital patients to be treated by COVID-positive nurses and workers (whose COVID-19 vaccinations failed to safeguard them from the virus) than by unvaccinated nurses with no COVID.

The new policy is outraging nurses across the nation. Zenei Triunfo-Cortez, president of National Nurses United, denounced the new policy: “Weakening COVID-19 guidance now, in the face of what could be the most devastating COVID-19 surge yet, will only result in further transmission, illness and death.”

Vaccination status has gone from being a proxy for health to being a substitute for sane health care policy.

Biden’s COVID-19 policy continues to ignore a torrent of evidence undercutting its mandates.

Biden recently declared that “almost everyone who has died from COVID-19 in the past many months has been unvaccinated.” But the fully vaccinated accounted for 21% to 27% of COVID-19 fatalities in Oregon from August through November; 40% to nearly 75% of deaths in Vermont from August into October.

In a recent television interview, Biden declared, “How about you make sure you’re vaccinated, so you do not spread the disease to anyone else.” But CDC Director Rochelle Walensky admitted in August: “What (COVID-19 vaccines) can’t do anymore is prevent transmission .”

Biden recently responded to the record breaking number of new COVID cases by saying that “nobody saw (the omicron variant) coming.” Many scientists had warned of new variants, but that apparently never showed up on the White House radar screen. The chaos from the surge in cases has been compounded by Biden’s failure to fulfill his pledge for easy accessibility to COVID-19 tests.

Vaccines can provide protection against COVID-19 for the elderly and high-risk groups, but there is insufficient evidence to justify forcibly injecting the nation at large. Almost a year ago, Biden promised in his inaugural address to “overcome this deadly virus.” Biden admitted last month that there is “no federal solution (to COVID-19). This gets solved at the state level.”

Biden’s admission provides ample justification for the Supreme Court to reject Biden’s latest iron-fisted wild swing to end the pandemic.

James Bovard, author of “Attention Deficit Democracy,” is a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors. Follow him on Twitter: @JimBovard