Mandatory Vaccines for Veterans Affairs and Other Health Care Workers As Covid Cases Climb
The nation’s largest integrated health system is pivoting to mandatory vaccines for Veterans Affairs healthcare workers.
The Department of Veterans Affairs, which runs one of the nation’s largest health systems, announced Monday it would mandate coronavirus vaccines for its front-line workers, becoming the first federal agency to do so and signaling what some experts said could be a national pivot to such requirements.
Faced with the explosive growth of a new virus variant, the state of California and the city of New York rolled out similar mandates. And an array of hospitals from coast to coast, including the prestigious Mayo Clinic, declared they would require staff to get vaccinated, following a joint plea from the nation’s major medical groups.
Health-care leaders say the moves represent an escalation of the nation’s fight against the coronavirus — the first concerted effort to mandate that tens of millions of Americans get vaccinated, more than seven months after regulators authorized the shots and as new cases rip through the nation. VA’s mandate applies to more than 100,000 front-line workers, New York City’s applies to about 45,000 city employees and contractors, and California’s applies to more than 2.2 million state employees and health workers.
“You can call it a tipping point,” said Mark Ghaly, California’s health secretary, noting that millions of people have declined the shots despite public health experts’ appeals and a range of incentives. “For so many Californians and Americans, this might be the time to get vaccinated.”
Ghaly noted that in California, about 900 coronavirus cases in mid-June were severe enough to require hospitalization versus nearly 3,000 now, driven by the hyper-transmissible delta variant. “As we stare down schools opening up in just a matter of a couple of weeks, as we look at the projections with delta, we felt now is the right time,” he said.
Confirmed coronavirus infections nationwide have quadrupled in July, from about 13,000 cases per day at the start of the month to more than 54,000 now, according to Washington Post tracking. Hospital leaders in states such as Alabama, Florida and Missouri have implored holdouts to get vaccinated, citing data that the shots prevent the most severe forms of the disease that lead to hospitalization and even death.
“We have reached a confluence where health-care workers want vaccine mandates, and government is responding,” said Ezekiel Emanuel, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania who organized the joint statement from nearly 60 medical groups, including the American Medical Association and the American Nurses Association, urging every health facility to require workers to get vaccinated.
“I fully expect more health care employers — health systems, long-term care companies, pharmacies and others — will mandate their employees get vaccinated,” Emanuel added. “The nation will be better off for it.”
About 60 percent of all U.S. adults are fully vaccinated, with the rate of new immunizations slowing since mid-April, according to The Post’s tracking. The White House has said it will not impose national mandates but supports private employers that create new requirements for their workers.
Cue paranoid conspiracy theories in 3.. 2.. 1..Report
I have a co-worker who is not anti-vax but merely anti-THIS-vax.
I bugged him about getting the shot, told him that the side effects were like a hangover but no worse than a hangover, everything. I tried to convince him.
He asked me why the FDA hasn’t approved it yet. He said that he’ll get the shot… once the FDA approves it.
And I found myself with a whole bunch of rants about the FDA that more or less died in my throat because, hey, this wasn’t about my crazy opinions on the FDA but about trying to get him to get the shot.
Anyway, if the FDA approved it, it’d make things a lot easier, I think.
It’s one thing to make an approved shot mandatory. Quite another to make one that hasn’t been approved mandatory.Report
You’d think by now there would be enough data for approval.Report
I have a handful of rants about how the FDA is risk-adverse to the point where it’s willing to kill people through inaction but most of the people here have heard them already.Report
They have powerful incentives to be risk adverse.Report
And unfortunately, nothing will change unless they are held accountable for the deaths they cause through inaction, and not merely the deaths they cause through action.Report
Or, alternatively, they are not tossed under the bus for the next Thalidomide, when they did due diligence and were trying to save lives.Report
Hey, can we do something about this guy?
I don’t mind having a dose of conspiracy crazy to remind us all that it exists in real life, but the constant spamming of it under a dozen different user names is kind of old.
If I was cynical, I’d say he keeps changing his name to evade people muting him. Or bans that haven’t been made public.Report
I believe that both Moderna and BioNTech were tinkering with their manufacturing methods and supply chains right up until they submitted their applications for full approval. The FDA has limited resources for doing all the analyses and on-site inspections required for the manufacturing and distribution parts of the approval. Stuff I have read suggests that the manufacturing part of the approval usually takes a year, and shortening it to less than six months is very difficult.
Didn’t help that J&J had to toss 60M doses of their vaccine due to manufacturing problems in the US.Report
I think the funniest thing is when the people who say “the FDA is too risk-averse and it’s holding back progress” and the people who say “the FDA approved this vaccine too fast, there’s no way they’re sure it’s safe” are the same people
(almost as funny as the people who still wear masks even though they’re no longer mandatory, but still wear them pulled down below their nose)Report
I’d enjoy having a discussion about “safe” and talk about stuff like tradeoffs and whatnot.
I’m sure you’ve seen the P&T vaccinations clip.
For those who have not:
We got into this with the whole AZ/J&J shot thing and the blood clots.
How many people got the shot? How many people got the blood clots after the shot? How many people who got the blood clots after getting the shot went on to die?
How many people got the covid? How many people who got the covid ended up dying? How many got the long covid?
What are the tradeoffs?
I could see waiting two extra days to get the Moderna but not waiting two extra years.
But you don’t see the big discussions about this sort of thing in anybody’s hands but the enthusiastic amateurs. Which is irritating.Report
Thing is, the FDA’s job is not “improve public health on average”. The FDA’s remit is to stop anyone being harmed by an adverse event involving a pharmaceutical or medical treatment. Stopping all use of the J&J vaccine without doing that kind of how-many-will-die-without-it analysis is exactly what the FDA thinks it’s supposed to do. If someone will die without the vaccine, well, they’d have died anyway, and now there won’t be anyone dying because of the vaccine.
“Don’t they know it’s different?” Well. One of the many amazing things about this while business has been just how hard government agencies went on Not Acting Like This Is Any Different. And, y’know, it’s not actually hard to understand why, because any regulation they relax Because COVID, any requirement they waive Because COVID, that’s all going to have to be put back later, and for the vast majority of these regulations the only thing justifying them is inertia. They’re in charge because They’re In Charge, and as soon as they stop being In Charge then they’ll never be in charge again, because it will be demonstrably the case that when they were Not In Charge the world did not slump over into a hell of death and misery.Report
Sure, and the people who agree with that sort of thing are now looking at the shot, and the FDA, and then the shot again and saying “yeah, I’ll wait for the FDA to approve it.”Report
But you don’t see the big discussions about this sort of thing in anybody’s hands but the enthusiastic amateurs. Which is irritating.
For some values of “you,” this is an accurate statement of what people “see.” And maybe it is irritating. But the “big discussions” would be among people actually qualified to look at the data and understand it and follow the discussion. Which isn’t most of us. And doesn’t become most of us after cursory reviews by “enthusiastic amateurs” that may or may not accurately reflect what the people with the background and training to understand and explain have seen and said. Which is why I have scrupulously avoided playing amateur epidemiologist or amateur immunologist throughout this pandemic.Report
And so we’re stuck with trusting that the authorities know what they’re doing.
They must!Report
…we’re stuck with trusting that the authorities know what they’re doing.
As opposed to when?
In virtually every moment of our life, we are trusting that the authorities- the doctor, the airline pilot, guy who built the bridge we cross- knows what he is doing.
Why is this different?Report
It depends on whether you see “The FDA hasn’t approved the shot!” as a fundamentally good argument to not get it, I guess.
(And, of course, whether to truth the authorities who say “you have to wear a mask!” without using the word “N95”.)Report
Is heroin actually bad?
Are vegetables actually good?
Does the vaccine work or not?
Should I mask up or not?
All these questions are clouded by contrarian viewpoints and cranks who sometimes turn out to be right.
But the end of the day, every person has to make a decision and pull the trigger one way or the other.
For me personally, the fact that virtually all cases are now among people who are unvaccinated and unmasked gives me the information I need for my personal health.
YMMVReport
Oh, I agree! I, personally, think that the FDA is a lot more restrictive than it needs to be.
But, you know.
There are people out there who think that it’s appropriately restrictive and then say stuff like “I’ll take the shot once the FDA approves it”.Report
The experts can be wrong, but if they are they will be caught out by other experts, not by talking heads and barstool pundits. You can call that “stuck” if you like. As if there were an alternative.Report
As if there were an alternative.
I’ll just go back to my complaint about a lack of transparency and how you don’t see the big discussions about this sort of thing in anybody’s hands but the enthusiastic amateurs. Which is irritating.Report
I suppose what you “don’t see” is a function of where you don’t look.Report
While absolutely true, I have, at least, *TRIED* to find good stuff on this.
I like Zeynep Tufekci. Unfortunately, she merely qualifies as an exceptionally good amateur.Report
” the “big discussions” would be among people actually qualified to look at the data and understand it and follow the discussion. ”
why would that not be the FDA?Report
The FDA is Jaybird’s hobby horse, not mine. Take it up with him.Report
What’s your idea of “people actually qualified to look at the data and understand it and follow the discussion” regarding a pandemic like COVID-19?
You very clearly have an idea of who this is. Who is it?Report
You mean besides the obvious?Report
I don’t know. You tell me. And while you’re at it, you can try to explain what you yourself are saying and what your point, if any, is.Report
“You mean besides the obvious?”
Typically cowardly behavior; you’re too scared to put up your stuff because you know you’ve got nothing. God help your clients.Report
If I thought you didn’t actually have pretty much the same idea as I have and almost everyone else has, I might take the time and effort to explain the — yes — obvious. But you aren’t actually confused, so I won’t.
As for my clients, they seem pretty satisfied. And the results justify their satisfaction.Report
St. Louis has just reinstated mask mandates (both city and county, which don’t overlap). The State is suing both because the mandate “undermines the important push for vaccinations.”
I guess the irony to me is that the emergency authorization for vaccine was amply justified by lack of known treatments, knowledge about the virus in general, and hospital capacity. The success of the vaccine tends to undercut the emergency. Now we have places declaring an emergency and mandating masks.Report
Now with delta, we’re headed back towards the pro-vaccination situation (and some places have gotten to and passed it), because of higher transmission rates, so some places are mandating masks to try to slow transmission. Makes sense to me.Report
Honestly, this is a no brainer, and long overdue. It’s hard to believe the medical field is coming to this so late.Report
My daughter did an internship at a VA hospital before the vaccines were available, and got exposed and had to quarantine twice. This is absolutely a no-brainer.Report
Managing members of the ruling Biden junta, Facebook and Google, have announced plans to “have everyone who returns to work be vaccinated.”
Within the day, they were already making exceptions. “Not you. You’re important.”Report