FEDS CALL FOR 3RD COVID SHOT
Biden warns nursing homes: Staff must get jabs, or you’ll lose fed funds
President Biden issued some tough love, booster shots and federal mandates on Wednesday in his own push to nurse the country past the pandemic.
The president, reckoning with a crisis in Afghanistan and a COVID summer surge at home, announced in speech from the White House that he would make staff vaccinations a condition for nursing homes to receive Medicare and Medicaid funds.
“If you visit, live or work in a nursing home, you should not be at a high risk for contracting COVID from unvaccinated employees,” a somber Biden said. “While I’m mindful that my authority at the federal level is limited, I’m going to continue to look for ways to keep people safe and increase vaccination rates.”
In some states, fewer than half of nursing home employees were immunized at the start of the month, according to federal figures from facilities that provided data, despite their high-risk work environment and the priority access to shots that they received.
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. The new rules would touch more than 15,000 nursing home facilities that account for some 1.3 million workers, according to the White House.
“Sadly, vaccination rates among nursing homes significantly trail the rest of the country,” Biden said. “These steps are all about keeping people safe and out of harm’s way.”
As coronavirus case counts climb in the U.S., fanned by the spread of the highly contagious delta variant, federal officials have scrambled throughout the summer to cajole Americans to get shots, branding the moment as a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
And in recent weeks, the ploys have increasingly tilted toward penalties: Biden said late last month that federal workers would need to receive immunizations or face onerous restrictions, and the Pentagon moved last week to institute a vaccine mandate by mid-September.
As of Tuesday, about 28% of the country’s adult population still had not received a single jab, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In New York State, 22% of adults had
yet to receive a shot, according to state data. But rates are much lower in many Republican-controlled regions.
The holdouts, numbering in the tens of millions nationally, remain seven months into the U.S. vaccination rollout and despite outbreaks that caused the seven-day average of new cases to more than triple over the past month.
The Biden administration noted, however, that the once-stalling rate of inoculations has picked up steam. The country logged its biggest two-week count of new shots since the start of June, Jeff Zients, the White House pandemic coordinator, said in a briefing Wednesday.
“Once the numbers from today are reported, we will have reached 200 million Americans with at least their first shot,” Zients said. “That’s a major milestone.”
But the drumbeat of COVID deaths has picked up, rattling a nation that hoped vaccines would cut the cord on the misery of the COVID crisis. Shots remain the surest path out of the pandemic, Biden said.
“Vaccines are the best defense,” the president said, though he also urged Americans to cover their faces, including students who are readying to return to school. “We need to make sure children are wearing masks.”
While not naming them, Biden made pointed remarks about governors who have bristled at continued mask-wearing. He said that attempts to ban masks in schools set a “dangerous tone,” and he threatened to send Education Secretary Miguel Cardona after leaders who undercut health measures in classrooms.
“As I’ve said before, if you aren’t going to fight COVID-19, at least get out of the way of everyone else who is trying,” Biden said.
He said Cardona’s charge could include deploying “oversight and legal action, if appropriate, against governors who are trying to block and intimidate local school officials and educators.” And he called out protesters in Tennessee who responded angrily to a mask mandate at local grade schools.
“This isn’t about politics,” Biden pleaded. “This is about keeping our children safe.”
While frustrated by those who are reluctant to embrace the tools to beat the virus,
Biden also outlined a new phase in the vaccination effort, saying that the government plans vaccination booster shots to become available to Americans the week of Sept. 20.
The third shots will be available to Americans who are eight months past their second Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna jab, pending final Food and Drug Administration approval, according to the White House. As in the original vaccine rollout, the first in line for boosters will be health care workers, nursing home residents and other older adults, followed by the rest of the population. For now, the extra jabs will be limited to adults.
“It’s the best way to protect ourselves from variants that could arrive,” Biden said.
According to the CDC, 169.2 million Americans are fully vaccinated by either the Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose vaccine or the two-dose series made by Pfizer and Moderna.
It was the second East Room address for Biden in three days. He also stood at a microphone in the ornate chamber on Monday, defiantly defending his decision to pull American military forces out of Afghanistan, a move that unleashed the swift Taliban takeover of the South Asian country.
On Wednesday evening, he did not address the overseas disaster, and he did not respond to a barrage of questions from reporters as he strode from his lectern following his remarks.
But he showed no signs of retreat in his politically fraught effort to escalate America’s vaccination program, praising private businesses that are instituting mandates and promising to use his bully pulpit in Washington to help end the pandemic.
“The threat of the delta virus remains real,” Biden said.
“This is no time to let our guard down. We just need to finish the job.”