Shots required:
Santa Clara County mandates that all 22,000 of its employees must be inoculated once the FDA grants full approval for the coronavirus vaccines.
Santa Clara County plans to require its 22,000 county employees to get coronavirus vaccinations, becoming the second Bay Area jurisdiction after San Francisco to announce a vaccine mandate for government workers.
San Francisco in June said it will require all 35,000 city employees to get vaccinated, but only after the Food and Drug Administration grants full approval for a vaccine. The vaccines available in the U.S. are currently under emergency use authorization and are expected to get full approval in the coming months.
Santa Clara County does not intend to wait for FDA approval to enact the mandate, county executive Jeff Smith said. It is not clear what date county workers will have to be vaccinated by.
San Francisco and Santa Clara have been at the forefront of some of the nation’s most aggressive pandemic response policies, including the first Bay Area shutdown in March 2020, and their vaccine mandates could portend similar action by other public or private employers. The two counties and Contra Costa County on Thursday urged employers in their jurisdictions to require vaccination for their workers, but stopped short of mandating it.
Already, a growing number of large public employers in California are requiring or plan to require vaccination. The University of California system — which includes UCSF, a major Bay Area employer — is requiring all 286,000 students and 227,000 faculty and staff to get shots before the school year starts in the fall. Similarly, Stanford University and Stanford Medicine are moving ahead with vaccine requirements; the roughly 28,000 employees at Stanford hospitals must be vaccinated by Aug. 15.
And San Francisco is requiring all workers at hospitals, nursing homes, jails and shelters in the city to be vaccinated by Sept. 15, even if they don’t work for the city.
The California State University system will also mandate vaccination for its 486,000 students and 56,000 faculty and staff, but only after the FDA approves a vaccine.
Few private employers have publicly signaled plans to enact vaccine mandates. However, Delta and United recently began requiring new hires to show proof of vaccination.
It is not clear if mandates will boost vaccination uptake, but similar action elsewhere in the country suggests they may. After the Houston Methodist health system in April became one of the first U.S. hospitals to mandate vaccination for workers, uptake among its 26,000 employees went from 85% to 98%, Bloomberg reported this month. About 600 people requested religious or medical exemptions, and 153 quit or were fired, according to Bloomberg.
Santa Clara’s vaccine requirement for county workers is the latest step by a Bay Area county to enact a mandate for county workers or county spaces that they are still just recommending for everyone else. San Mateo County this week said it will require everyone going into county buildings to wear a mask, vaccinated or unvaccinated. For noncounty buildings in San Mateo and elsewhere in the Bay Area, indoor masking is recommended but not required.