For the past three months, the Democrats’ rhetoric about the Occupational Health and Safety Administration’s new workplace rule highlighted the effort to get Americans vaccinated. After a slew of lawsuits, mounting worries about mandate-related layoffs and GOP calling it an attack on individual liberties, they’re talking more about the testing and masking requirements in the rule.

“The OSHA rule does not mandate the vaccine. It’s a way out of the weekly test. A weekly test that is a little swab swirled around your nostril five or six times for thirty seconds. That’s the requirement,” Sen. Chris Murphy, Connecticut Democrat, said in midweek speech slamming a GOP resolution to quash the OSHA rule.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters a day later that OSHA dictated “not just a vaccine requirement, but also a testing option.”

It’s a shift in tenor from September when Mr. Biden characterized the OSHA rule as a lever to reduce the spread of the virus by increasing the share of vaccinated workers.