The FPS and proposed amendments typify a hurried and ill conceived administrative process that has saved no one while imposing near impossible burdens on thousands of individuals, businesses and organizations. Creating sedimentary layers of duplicative, discordant and scientifically unsupportable shoulds on the Commonwealth's businesses and employers has brought only confusion and noncompliance, not an orderly informed path toward worker safety. The amendments are out of step with swiftly changing CDC guidance and even conflict with executive orders and various state and federal safety enactments. The Standard cannot keep pace with medical developments. Its central flaw of perpetual obsolescence cannot be papered over. 

The attempt to impose burdens and benefits based on employee vaccination status invades well established zones of constitutional privacy. It effectively creates a caste system that coerces employees into making decisions about their body, health and family based on the State's preferences rather than respecting the medical self determination of its citizens. The vaccination apartheid proposed by DOLI also has a disparate impact on Blacks and Latinos who are less likely to obtain vaccines and therefore more likely to be blackballed, marginalized and harassed. The DOLI approach of medical status haves and have nots compels employers to violate the ADA, informational privacy laws as well as civil rights laws .

Regarding PPEs, simply read the mask disclaimers. They affirm what everybody already knows; masks do not reduce virus transmission, so why are public officials persisting in this cruel charade devoid of scientific merit? 

The regs were a trainwreck from the beginning. They were enacted without public input, without expertise in contagious diseases and without the careful measured approach owed to the People of Virginia. Repeal is the only logical and ethical solution. Public officials who tinker with the lives of the citizenry should at least honor the principles of Hippocrates, the father of medicine, who presciently warned medical professionals to first, DO NO HARM. The FPS and its proposed amendments work substantial harm to both employers and employees and should therefore be repealed. No amount of wordsmithing can salvage this bureaucratic debacle.