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Biden is requiring employers with more 100 employees to mandate vaccines or weekly testing.
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Federal employees and healthcare workers are also required to be vaccinated, per Biden’s new plan.
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The new measures hope to counteract Delta’s prevailing threat in the US.
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The Biden administration is requiring employers with more than 100 employees to mandate vaccines or weekly testing – a move that will impact more than 80 million workers.
The administration will also enforce fines of up to $14,000 per violation for employers that ignore these mandates, according to The Washington Post.
The move is part of a larger plan to stop the spread of COVID-19, which Biden unveiled Thursday afternoon.
That plan includes vaccine mandates for federal employees, contractors of federal agencies, and staff at all healthcare facilities that receive federal funding from Medicare or Medicaid. Unlike employees at private companies, these workers would not have the option to get routinely tested as an alternative to being vaccinated.
Biden previously stated last month that federal workers must be fully vaccinated or get tested regularly and wear a mask. He also mandated COVID-19 vaccines for nursing home staff.
By introducing new mandates, and making it harder for federal workers to skirt existing ones, Biden hopes to counteract the Delta variant’s prevailing threat in the US.
The variant now accounts for more than 90% of COVID-19 cases in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Though daily cases have begun to decline slightly, they still hover at around 136,000 per day, on average. White House Chief Medical Advisor Anthony Fauci told Axios that daily cases should ideally be below 10,000 for the coronavirus to no longer pose a public-health threat.
Average daily hospitalizations and deaths also remain high, at roughly 100,000 and 1,000 per day, respectively.
Public-health experts widely agree that the only way out of the current surge is by increasing vaccination rates.
“What is likely to happen is that there are going to be more and more mandates for immunization coming from other sectors,” Chris Beyrer, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told Insider.
“For people who opt out of these mandates or refuse,” he added, “it’s probably going to become so challenging with all the restrictions and testing that life will get very hard if you’re un-immunized.”
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