The country is seeing a mounting wave of delta-fueled coronavirus infections and hospitalizations despite the availability of safe and effective vaccines, circumstances that this week compelled some local governments, health groups, and even a federal agency to impose vaccine mandates on certain workers. “You can call it a tipping point,” California health secretary Mark Ghaly told the Washington Post, as his state on Monday announced that state employees and health care workers will next month be forced to either get vaccinated or submit themselves to regular testing.
On the other coast, the city of New York similarly leveled up, as Mayor Bill de Blasio said all municipal workers—including police officers and teachers—will be required to be vaccinated or face weekly testing come September. “It means people who work in offices and people who work on the front line. Everyone,” he said, a broadening of the vaccine requirements for public health workers that the mayor only just announced last week. On Tuesday, de Blasio said that attendees at the star-studded “homecoming” concert next month in Central Park will have to show proof of vaccination.
The Biden administration has firmly stated that they do not believe it is the federal government’s role to mandate vaccines but have simultaneously supported local governments and the private sector doing so amid stagnant vaccination rates and the delta variant ripping through communities—especially undervaccinated ones—across the country. “It’s purely political,” New York Times reporter Jennifer Steinhauer told The Daily of the White House’s calculation, inspired at least in part by conservatives framing President Joe Biden’s vaccination effort as pernicious government overreach. “Having a mandate reinforces all of that in a very visible way,” Steinhauer noted.
Yet on Monday, the Department of Veteran Affairs appeared to break with that position in becoming the first federal agency to mandate coronavirus vaccines for more than 100,000 front-line workers, the Post reports. But as Steinhauer noted, the Biden administration has “tried to keep this in the health care box,” brushing it off as “not a federal employee mandate,” but “a mandate on a federally functioning healthcare system.” It remains to be seen whether that approach will stave off protest. The VA noted in the press release that the department—the country’s largest integrated health system—has in recent weeks “lost four employees to COVID-19—all of whom were unvaccinated” and outbreaks among unvaccinated staffers at a VA training center. “This action is aimed at ensuring that we are doing everything we can to protect our veterans and the system that serves them,” said VA spokesperson Randol Noller.
Monday was also the day that an array of hospitals nationwide, including the Mayo Clinic, announced vaccine mandates for staffers, a move that came as more than 50 medical groups across the country issued a joint call for health care and long-term care employers to issue such requirements, the Post reports. That plea underscores leaders’ frustration with those resistant to the vaccine at this point in the pandemic, when shots that might prevent the most severe forms of the virus sit unused. Among the holdouts are health care employees: more than a reported 38 percent of nursing home staff were not fully vaccinated as of a few weeks ago. At the end of May, an analysis by WebMD and Medscape Medical News estimated that “1 in 4 hospital workers who have direct contact with patients had not received a single dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.”
The wave of announcements on Monday speaks to the worrisome confluence of a new virus variant and lagging vaccination rates since mid-April, apparently unmoved by the slew of incentives the nation has rolled out in an attempt to persuade people and thus spurring leaders to resort to contentious alternatives. Colleges that have adopted vaccine requirements have already seen pushback, and the American Federation of Teachers was among the labor unions speaking out against this week’s new rule. With cases again surging, the CDC on Tuesday is expected to urge vaccinated people to wear masks indoors in certain parts of the country. Yet despite the tougher stance California and New York City are taking, Axios notes that a number of Republican-led states have preemptively moved to ban vaccine requirements—a fight rooted, as Steinhauer put it, in “the politics of vaccines, which have dogged this whole effort from the very beginning.”
— How Yulia Navalnaya Became Russia’s Real First Lady
— Rupert Murdoch Buried Trump’s Election Night Dreams in a Shallow Grave
— Ivanka Trump Is Next on the Chopping Block
— A Mass Labor Shortage Is Leaving Hamptonites to Fend for Themselves
— The Secret History of Gavin McInnes
— Trump and DeSantis Are on a Collision Course
— Inside the Rash of Unexplained Deaths at Fort Hood
— The Kushner Family Is Cozying Up to Nikki Haley
— From the Archive: Miami Beach, Waterworld
— Not a subscriber? Join Vanity Fair to receive full access to VF.com and the complete online archive now.
"along" - Google News
July 28, 2021 at 12:50AM
https://ift.tt/3iWsrNF
Vaccine Mandates Are Spreading Along With the Summer COVID Surge - Vanity Fair
"along" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2z4LAdj
https://ift.tt/35rGyU8
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Vaccine Mandates Are Spreading Along With the Summer COVID Surge - Vanity Fair"
Post a Comment