(NewsReady.com) – It’s well-known that President Joe Biden loves Amtrak, the train company. In 1987, he launched his unsuccessful presidential bid from one of the company’s train stations, and in 2011, that station was renamed in honor of him. Now, it seems the company isn’t on board (pun intended) with one of his major policies.
According to reports, Amtrak CEO Bill Flynn told employees he’s pausing the company’s vaccine mandate. He cited a federal court decision that stopped the enforcement of Biden’s requirement that all companies with more than 100 employees implement a mandate or strict testing policy. The train company currently has a vaccination rate of about 95%.
Breaking: @Amtrak suspends vaccine mandate and no longer expects to have to cut some service in January pic.twitter.com/zBbj6QXjBg
— davidshepardson (@davidshepardson) December 14, 2021
Biden has a long relationship with the company. In 1973, just months after his first wife and infant daughter died in a car crash, he started commuting between Delaware and Washington, DC, every day so he could be home with their kids, Hunter and Beau, each night. For the next four decades, he was a permanent fixture on the train.
The real story of Biden’s obsession with Amtrak is a good one. For some reason, he likes to tell a story that fact-checkers have questioned. The president claims a conductor spoke to him seven years (sometimes he says it was during his fourth or fifth year) into his vice presidency (2015) and said he’d logged more miles on the train than he had on Air Force Two. The problem with his story is that the man he mentions, Angelo Negri, died in 2014.
After announcing the vaccine mandate was ending, Amtrak also said it wouldn’t need to cut some service in January. Coincidence?
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