President Joe Biden will require COVID-19 vaccinations for staff members at all healthcare facilities that receive federal funding – more than 17 million employees in total, the White House announced Thursday. Under the new rules, these employees won’t have the option to get routinely tested as an alternative to being vaccinated.
The move is part of a larger plan to stop the spread of COVID-19, which Biden unveiled Thursday afternoon.
The new policy implements a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for all hospitals that receive Medicare or Medicaid funding – about 50,000 healthcare providers in total. Biden’s plan also involves an emergency requirement that companies with more than 100 employees require workers to be vaccinated or get tested weekly. Federal employees and contractors of federal agencies, meanwhile, will be required to get vaccinated.
The US Government Accountability Office estimates that tens of thousands of healthcare facilities participate in Medicare and Medicaid. Few hospitals elect not to, since it would mean turning away the majority of patients seeking care. Nonprofit hospitals also receive a federal tax exemption for treating Medicare and Medicaid patients.
Biden’s new mandate, therefore, could significantly raise vaccination rates among US healthcare workers. These rates remain surprisingly low after hospital workers were among the first to become eligible for COVID-19 shots during the winter.
A recent analysis of data collected by the US Department of Health and Human Services found that by the end of May, one in four hospital workers who had direct contact with patients had not received a single vaccine dose. The analysis also found that one in three healthcare workers at the US’s 50 largest hospitals were unvaccinated.
“You just get tired of this after a while,” Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told Insider last month. “You shouldn’t have to convince people who work around a vulnerable population of hospitalized patients that part of that means that you don’t get to catch and transmit a potentially fatal infection.”
Low vaccination rates also present a continued health risk at long-term-care facilities. Just 46% of aides and 57% of nurses at these facilities were vaccinated as of early April, according to a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Biden announced last month that he would require nursing home staff to be vaccinated against COVID-19.
Hilary Brueck contributed reporting.
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