CLEVELAND, Ohio — The Cleveland Clinic and University Hospitals, which up until now had not announced plans to mandate vaccines for workers, will be forced to do so under a new federal rule announced Thursday.
The nation’s hospitals are among the U.S. businesses that President Joe Biden will order to mandate the COVID-19 vaccine for employees, he said in a speech to the nation.
The Clinic will follow the new rule, it said in a statement released Thursday.
“The COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective and are the best way to protect individuals from severe illness or death from the virus,” the Clinic said in a statement responding to the new federal vaccine mandate. “We are awaiting more information and plan to comply with federal requirements. Nearly 80% of our caregivers have already received their COVID-19 vaccine.”
In a statement released Thursday, UH said, “As we’ve maintained, we believe that the vaccines are safe, effective and recommended. We believe in the science because we participated in developing the vaccines. COVID-19 vaccines prevent severe illness, hospitalization and death.
“Until we have a chance to review the rules the President referenced in his address this evening, we can’t comment on the specific requirements, but believe that getting vaccinated is one of the most important ways people can protect themselves, the people they care about, and their communities from COVID-19,” UH said.
The Clinic and UH are among the largest healthcare systems in Northeast Ohio without vaccine mandates.
Other local hospitals, including SummaHealth, MetroHealth System, Akron Children’s and the Louis Stokes VA Medical Center, have announced plans to make vaccines mandatory for employees.
“If you’re seeking care at a health facility, you should be able to know that the people treating you are vaccinated, simple, straightforward, period,” Biden said.
“Already I’ve announced over requiring vaccinations at all nursing home workers who treat patients on Medicare and Medicaid because I have that federal authority,” Biden said. “Tonight I’m using that same authority to expand that to cover those who work in hospitals, home health care facilities or other medical facilities — a total of 17 million healthcare workers,” Biden said.
Leaders at hospitals that are planning vaccine mandates said they took that step in order to keep patients and caregivers safe and slow the spread of COVID-19.
The CEOs of the Clinic and UH said they feared that vaccine mandates would lead to more caregivers quitting their jobs or getting fired, thus making staff shortages worse and making it harder to deliver care.
Clinic CEO Dr. Tomislav Mihaljevic and UH CEO Dr. Cliff Megerian appeared at a virtual City Club forum in August. Mihaljevic warned that hospitals are already understaffed and losing healthcare employees during a public health crisis would jeopardize the Clinic’s ability to provide care. “This is something that is on everybody’s mind,” Mihaljevic said.
Staff reductions have been seen in other places with vaccine mandates that included job termination for lack of compliance, Megerian said, but he did not supply specifics.
UH does not want to add to the region’s unemployment rate, Megerian said.
Strict COVID-19 measures, such as masking and hand washing, were keeping patients safe from the virus before vaccines were available, and are still doing the job, the hospital leaders said.
Biden outlined several steps the federal government will take in order to curb the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic that has surged in recent weeks, in part due to the highly infectious delta variant.
Among those steps:
- The Department of Labor is developing an emergency rule to require all employers with 100 or more employees that together employ over 80 million workers to ensure their workforces are fully vaccinated or show a negative test at least once a week.
- An executive order will require all executive branch federal employees to be vaccinated, all I’ve signed another executive order that will require federal contractors to do the same.
- The Department of Labor will require employers with 100 or more workers to give those workers paid time off to get vaccinated. “No one should lose pay in order to get vaccinated or take a loved one to get vaccinated,” Biden said.
- Top retailers like WalMart, Amazon and Kroger’s. will start selling at-home rapid test kits at cost for the next three months.
Responding to the new federal rule mandating vaccines for health care employees, Mark Parkinson, president and CEO of American Health Care Association and National Center for Assisted Living, said in a statement, ”We applaud President Biden for expanding COVID-19 vaccination requirements to all Medicare and Medicaid-certified health care settings as well as larger businesses. This will help prevent unvaccinated nursing home staff from looking for new lines of work, alleviating some of the staffing challenges too many long term care facilities are currently facing. Nearly 4,000 providers expressed their concerns about a federal mandate only for nursing home staff, and we appreciate the Administration listening to those concerns and applying this policy more broadly.
“This vaccine policy will also help protect our nation’s most vulnerable, who often interact with a variety of health care professionals on a regular basis,” Parkinson said. “We support the Administration’s efforts to get more people vaccinated, and we look forward to working with them on finding additional solutions that will help us address this unprecedented situation.”
There have been 40 million cases of COVID-19 recorded in the United States — nearly one-fifth of all cases worldwide — according to a database compiled by the New York Times.
As of Sunday there have been an average 161,000 new cases of COVID-19 in this country each day, according to press reports. Hospitalizations are about 102,000 each day, and the daily COVID-19 death toll is now at 1,560.
No U.S. state has yet gotten more than 70% of its residents fully vaccinated, according to the New York Times.
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