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posted by martyb on Friday September 10 2021, @07:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the get-vacinated-and-wear-a-mask dept.

With COVID out of control, Biden unveils hefty vaccine mandates:

President Joe Biden on Thursday unveiled a sweeping six-pronged plan to try to regain control over the COVID-19 pandemic, which is wildly raging once again in the US.

[...] The main focus of the president's "Path out of the Pandemic" plan is on reducing the number of unvaccinated people in the country. As such, the plan's most prominent elements are hefty vaccination requirements for millions of federal employees, health care workers, school employees, and even employees of private businesses.

Biden signed an executive order Thursday requiring COVID-19 vaccines for millions of federal workers plus millions more federal contractors. The new vaccine mandate eliminates a previous option that allowed federal workers to undergo regular testing in lieu of vaccination.

In addition to mandating vaccines for federal workers, Biden will also require vaccination for over 17 million health care workers who work at facilities that receive federal funding. The administration had previously required vaccination for all staff of federally funded nursing homes. The new requirements will extend vaccine mandates to hospitals, dialysis facilities, ambulatory surgical settings, and home health agencies—most facilities that receive Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements.

[...] The administration is also working on a rule—to be implemented through the Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration—that will require employers with 100 or more workers to ensure that their workforce is fully vaccinated or submits to regular COVID-19 testing. The rule is expected to apply to over 80 million employees nationwide. OSHA is also working on a separate rule that will require those employers to provide paid time off to get vaccinated.

For schools, Biden will require vaccination for the nearly 300,000 staff in federal Head Start and Early Head start programs. He will also put pressure on governors to get all teachers and school staff vaccinated. Last, the administration will push more schools to implement regular testing, which will be funded by $10 billion the administration already allocated to schools earlier this year.

Also at CNN, www.aljazeera.com


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by sjames on Friday September 10 2021, @10:04PM (2 children)

    by sjames (2882) on Friday September 10 2021, @10:04PM (#1176809) Journal

    Wow, you're really bending backwards to miss the point. Kinda Matrix like.

    The hospitals mostly had adequate capacity until they started filling with anti-vaxers and COVID deniers.

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  • (Score: 2) by shortscreen on Friday September 10 2021, @11:10PM (1 child)

    by shortscreen (2252) on Friday September 10 2021, @11:10PM (#1176822) Journal

    That's not how I remember it, but it also doesn't explain why mandates are coming down for the benefit of for-profit hospitals. What will you say tomorrow when there's an executive order forbidding you from watching porn online justified by saying that Comcast's network is too congested? Should you have to comply with that, to help out Comcast? Even if you don't use Comcast?

    • (Score: 2) by sjames on Friday September 10 2021, @11:25PM

      by sjames (2882) on Friday September 10 2021, @11:25PM (#1176826) Journal

      Nobody will die if I congest Comcast's network with traffic I paid for the right to cause.

      Keeping the hospitals from being pushed past 100% isn't really for the benefit of hospital profits, it's to keep people who need hospitalization from dying from lack of medical resources.

      Are you actually trying to claim that people who don't get severe COVID and put on a ventilator are somehow deprived? Am I to understand that people are getting sick for the entertainment value? You're fighting for the 'right' to get sick and die?