Some workers skeptical of vaccine. Can the state force them?
Pat Withrow, the San Joaquin County sheriff, survived a bout with COVID-19 last summer. Dozens of inmates and staff at the county jail also have tested positive.
So it was with a good deal of alarm that Withrow reported last week that many of his deputies are reluctant to take the new coronavirus vaccines. The same is true, he said, for a shocking number of healthcare workers in the region.
“If you want to help small businesses in our area, then get vaccinated — just go out and get vaccinated,” he told the Board of Supervisors. “That’s when our businesses will be able to open. That’s when our schools will be able to open — when we reach that critical mass of enough people having been vaccinated.”
Withrow urged the county to embark on an educational campaign to encourage people to get their shots. For now, across the state, that appears to be about as far any government official is willing to take it, despite having legal authority to mandate workers to get vaccines in order to get paid.
The same is true in Sacramento, El Dorado and other neighboring counties. The city of Sacramento also is adopting a voluntary policy.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom — whose administration is struggling to enforce facemask orders and other policies — isn’t planning to require the hundreds of thousands of state workers to get vaccinated, according to a spokes
woman for his office. Newsom last week asked the Legislature to spend $372 million to improve vaccine distribution, including a “public awareness campaign to increase vaccine adoption,” according to his budget proposal.
The same voluntary policies pervade the private sector, too — even in frontline industries facing down massive outbreaks. Hospitals throughout California are making the shots voluntary for their doctors, nurses and other employees.
But will vaccines remain voluntary forever? As the pandemic worsens and California’s COVID-19 death toll surges past 29,000, experts believe that at some point, some government and private employers will have to make the vaccines mandatory for workers as supplies become more readily available.
“If we don’t use the best weapon we’ve got, we’re going to be isolating, masking and testing for years,” said Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine. “Plus, we’re still going to have the economy damaged and unable to recover, and we’re still going to be arguing about opening schools forever.”
Instituting a mandatory vaccine policy could generate considerable legal and ethical problems, despite experts like Caplan saying the vaccines are safe and nearly every eligible person needs to be vaccinated for American life to return to normal.
Employees covered by union contracts would in all likelihood be exempt, legal experts say. Employees also can claim exemptions on religious grounds or because of existing medical disabilities.
Employers are required by federal law to make “reasonable accommodations” for those who refuse to get vaccinated — a step that could include physically isolating them from their co-workers, said Elizabeth Stallard, a labor-law specialist at the DowneyBrand law firm in Sacramento.
Above all, fighting human nature may be the biggest enemy. If the goal is to get as many people vaccinated as possible, it could backfire as people push back against the government dictating what they put in their bodies.
That’s particularly true, ironically, in the healthcare sector.
As a practical matter, hospitals don’t want “to enforce a rule against the will of a significant number of people,” said Lisa Ikemoto, a UC Davis law professor who specializes in healthcare law. “Making it voluntary may be the most effective way to get compliance.”
Even state Sen. Richard Pan, D-Sacramento, a physician who has spearheaded legislation to close loopholes that allow parents to keep their schoolage kids from getting vaccinated against childhood diseases, said he’s leery about any mass COVID-19 vaccine mandates for adults.
Instead, he expects more people will get over their hesitancy as they see their friends, family members and neighbors get the shots and have no ill health effects.
Plus, he said, many businesses — airlines, cruise ships and the like — are going to eventually require proof of vaccination for customers. Pan said when people “really want something,” such as going on a vacation, they’ll get vaccinated.
“‘No mask; no service;’ ‘No vaccine; no service,’ ” he said. “That’s up to the business.”
For the moment, though, vaccine hesitancy is widespread, and threatening to push recovery from the pandemic further out of reach.
A Kaiser Family Foundation survey in mid-December found about about one in four Americans are unlikely to take the vaccine. What’s more, the survey found nearly one in three of America’s healthcare workers won’t get vaccinated.
Some California hospitals are reporting that as many as half of their employees aren’t getting vaccinated. Reports are emerging of vaccines spoiling and getting tossed in part because so many people first in line to receive the shots are refusing them.
Kaiser Permanente has vaccinated more than 47,000 of its Northern California employees; it wouldn’t say how many have refused.
“I was mostly surprised to see how many of my colleagues are pretty vocal about their skepticism,” said Heather Olmsted Hamlin, an emergency department nurse at Kaiser’s South Sacramento hospital who insisted that she wasn’t speaking on behalf of her employer.