The vaccine mandate rule coming from the federal government, as opposed to being individually enforced, will protect many employers from facing lawsuits, said employment lawyer Brett Coburn of firm Alston & Bird. “I’m sure there will be a lot of employers who chafe at this for a variety of reasons, but some employers I think may welcome it,” he said. “It kind of takes it out of their hands to some extent to say, ‘Sorry, OSHA said we have to do this and we have to follow what OSHA tells us.’
“The CDC gives us guidelines. OSHA gives us rules. And that’s a really important distinction,” Coburn said, noting that he has seen a growing number of companies in the last month move toward vaccine requirements.
Biden also announced that federal workers and contractors will be required to be vaccinated for COVID-19, eliminating an option laid out in July for unvaccinated employees to be regularly tested instead.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said federal workers would have about 75 days to become fully vaccinated, once Biden signed an executive order later Thursday. She said there would be limited exemptions for religious or medical reasons.
Some federal agencies will require proof of vaccination while others will accept attestations, Psaki said. Workers who fail to comply with the requirement will be counseled by their human resources departments, and then will face “progressive disciplinary action,” she said.
Biden said the Transportation Security Administration would now double the fines for travelers who refuse to wear masks, as public blowups in airports and aboard trains over mask mandates have become a frequent experience for employees of the travel industry.
“If you break the rules, be prepared to pay,” Biden said. “And by the way, show some respect. The anger you see on television towards flight attendants and others doing their jobs is wrong. It’s ugly.”
Biden also announced that 17 million health care workers at hospitals and other health care settings like dialysis clinics and home health agencies that receive Medicare or Medicaid funding will have to be vaccinated.
There will be similar requirements for teachers and staff at the Head Start early education program and other federally funded educational settings, such as schools on military bases.
The government also plans to boost access to home tests for COVID-19, buying nearly $2 billion in tests for a variety of settings ranging from shelters to food banks. Walmart, Amazon and Kroger will sell home tests at cost for the next three months, according to the White House plan.
The United States has already recorded more than 40 million confirmed cases of the virus, with some 650,000 American lives lost as a result, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University. COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths have spiked recently, due in large part to the delta variant, which experts say appears to be twice as transmissible as the highly contagious original strain. The vast majority of hospitalizations and deaths in the current surge are among the unvaccinated.