President Joe Biden on Wednesday announced that his administration will require that nursing home staff be vaccinated against COVID-19 as a condition for those facilities to continue receiving federal Medicare and Medicaid funding.
Biden unveiled the new policy Wednesday afternoon in a White House address as the administration continues to look for ways to use mandates to encourage vaccine holdouts to get shots.
“If you visit, live or work in a nursing home, you should not be at a high risk for contracting COVID from unvaccinated employees,” Biden said.
The new mandate, in the form of a forthcoming regulation to be issued by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, could take effect as soon as next month.
Hundreds of thousands of nursing home workers are not vaccinated, according to federal data, despite those facilities bearing the brunt of the early COVID-19 outbreak and their workers being among the first in the country to be eligible for shots.
It comes as the Biden administration seeks to raise the costs for those who have yet to get vaccinated, after months of incentives and giveaways proved to be insufficient to drive tens of millions of Americans to roll up their sleeves.
In just the past three weeks, Biden has forced millions of federal workers to attest to their vaccination status or face onerous new requirements, with even stricter requirements for federal workers in frontline health roles, and his administration has moved toward mandating vaccines for the military as soon as next month.
Biden has also celebrated businesses that have mandated vaccines for their own workforces and encouraged others to follow, and highlighted local vaccine mandates as a condition for daily activities, like indoor dining.
The new effort seems to be paying off, as the nation’s rate of new vaccinations has nearly doubled over the past month. More than 200 million Americans have now received at least one dose of the vaccines, according to the White House, but about 80 million Americans are eligible but haven’t yet been vaccinated.
Mark Parkinson, the president and CEO of the American Health Care Association and National Center for Assisted Living, praised the Biden decision, but called on him to go further.
“Vaccination mandates for health care personnel should be applied to all health care settings,” he said. “Without this, nursing homes face a disastrous workforce challenge.”
Last year CMS used similar regulatory authority to prohibit most visitors from nursing homes in an effort to protect residents.
Joe Biden said on Wednesday his administration planned to make Covid-19 vaccine booster shots available to all Americans starting on 20 September as infections rise from the Delta variant of the coronavirus.
The White House is prepared to offer a third booster shot starting on that date to all Americans who completed their initial inoculation at least eight months ago, the US Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement.
“This will boost your immune response,” Biden said at the White House. “It’s the best way to protect ourselves from new variants that could arise.”
The president urged anyone 18 or older who got the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine to seek a booster shot eight months after their second dose, echoing the advice from his pandemic response team.
He also announced that he was directing the health department to develop regulations to require nursing homes to mandate coronavirus vaccinations for their employees in order to receive Medicare or Medicaid funding.
Biden noted that more than 130,000 residents of nursing homes had died of coronavirus since the start of the pandemic.
“At the same time, vaccination rates among nursing home staff significantly trail the rest of the country,” Biden said, adding that high vaccination rates helped protect older patients in such facilities.
“I’m using the power of the federal government, as a payer of healthcare costs, to ensure we reduce those risks to our most vulnerable seniors,” Biden said.
He also fiercely criticized Republican governors who are attempting to ban mask mandates in classrooms, such as Florida and Texas, where Delta infections are the worst in the country – even as young children remain ineligible to receive a coronavirus vaccine.
“They’re setting a dangerous tone,” Biden said of the governors. “This isn’t about politics. It’s about keeping our children safe.”
The president said he would direct his education secretary, Miguel Cardona, to use all of his oversight power, including “legal action if appropriate”, against governors who try to overrule school leaders on masking policies.
Biden added that money from the American Rescue Plan could be used to reimburse the salaries of teachers who were financially punished for trying to enforce mask mandates.
The president defended the decision to recommend booster shots while so many around the world have yet to be able to get their first shot, amid criticism from the World Health Organization on the matter.
Biden indicated that the US had time and capacity to supply vaccines to many in the rest of the world and prepare for additional vaccination of its own population.
Earlier, the White House pandemic response coordinator, Jeff Zients, said the coronavirus vaccine booster shots would be free for all Americans. “It will be just as easy and convenient to get a booster shot as it is to get a first shot today,” Zients said.
The booster shots initially will be given primarily to healthcare workers, nursing home residents and older people, all of whom were among the first groups to be vaccinated in late 2020 and early 2021, the department said.
Top US health officials said in a joint statement that they based their decision to offer boosters on data showing that the protectiveness of Covid-19 shots currently authorized in the United States begins to diminish in the months after the shots are given.
The officials said that they expect that people who received Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose Covid-19 vaccine will also need boosters.
US health officials previously authorized a third dose of vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna for people with weak immune systems. The broader booster program follows mounting evidence that protection from the vaccines wanes after six or more months, particularly in older people with underlying health conditions.
Meanwhile the Biden administration remained committed to convincing more Americans to get their first vaccine dose.
“This remains a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” Zients said.
