Local hospitals reacted Friday to President Joseph Biden’s sweeping vaccine mandates directed at the health care workers, who make up much of the Houston workforce.
In a move that overrides Gov. Greg Abbott’s executive order barring public institutions from issuing their own COVID-19 restrictions, the administration said it would require vaccinations for employees at health care facilities that accept Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement.
Baylor College of Medicine’s dean of clinical affairs, Dr. James McDeavitt, said Thursday he supported the new measures.
“It is the right thing to do,” he said.
Still, he wished the plan had come sooner. “It is not going to help us with the current delta surge,” he added.
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Five Houston hospital systems already require a vaccine. In June, Houston Methodist became the first hospital in the nation to announce it would require its staff to be fully vaccinated, a move that met months of resistance, including a lawsuit by some employees. Memorial Hermann and Baylor College of Medicine enacted their own vaccine mandates in July; St. Luke’s Health and Texas Children’s Hospital announced similar plans in August.
Thursday’s executive order will bring similar mandates to the city’s remaining health systems.
Until now, Harris Health System and UTHealth had encouraged worker vaccinations but were unable to require it under the governor’s order.
But on Friday, Harris Health System said it “fully intends to embrace the vaccine mandate” for workers at its two hospitals, 18 community health centers and 10 clinics serving the greater Houston area. The system has not yet set a date.
UT Health said it would wait for guidance from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Service, expected in October. It had not instituted a mandate as of Friday afternoon.
St. Joseph Medical Center and UTMB Galveston said they are still evaluating Biden’s plan.
While Kelsey-Seybold Clinic said in August it was waiting for full vaccine approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration before asking employees to provide proof of immunization, the clinic has not announced a mandate since the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine gained full U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval late last month.
See here for the background. I agree that the mandate coming out now will have little to no effect on the current surge, given that it takes a few weeks to get both shots and the full effect of them, and that it will take time for these hospital systems to get their programs going. It would still be nice if some of them had more of a sense of urgency about it. This is still by far the best thing we can do for the medium to longer term, and at the very least these hospital systems should be setting a better example. Get it done already, y’all. The Trib has more.
Actually, they have a good excuse. If they aren’t lying about staffing shortages. But I read about hospitals telling women to go home and have their baby, because they had too many nurses quit at the hospital.
Does anyone wonder why the Front Line workers who have been working around the illness for over a year don’t want to get the vaccinations? Are they just stupid? Or selfish? What does the Prevailing Narrative Provided by the Media tell you today?