Get a vaccine or face weekly tests

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California and New York City announced Monday that they will require all government employees to get a coronavirus vaccine or face a weekly COVID-19 test, and the Department of Veterans Affairs became the first major federal agency to require health care workers to receive the vaccine.

Meanwhile, in a possible sign that increasingly urgent health warnings are reaching more Americans, vaccination rates are beginning to rise again, giving hope that the nation can be freed from the coronavirus if people who have been reluctant to get vaccinated have They finally became vaccinated.

Dr Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, said the announcements are “opening doors wide” as more government entities and companies enforce vaccine mandates after “national vaccination efforts hit a wall”.

“Some people find mask mandates annoying, but the truth is they are temporary. We can’t do it forever,” he said. “Vaccine mandates should be one of the main paths forward because they bring us closer to the finish line. Mask delegates only give you more time.”

In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that all municipal workers — including teachers and police officers — will be required to get vaccinated by mid-September or face a weekly COVID-19 test, making the city one of the largest employers in the United States. to take such action.

California said it will similarly require proof of vaccination or a weekly test for all state workers and millions of health care workers in the public and private sectors starting next month.

The VA’s move came on a day when nearly 60 leading medical and healthcare organizations issued a call through the American Medical Association of Healthcare Facilities to ask their workers to vaccinate.

It was not clear what would happen to employees who refused to comply. Some unions representing New York City workers said the city could not enforce the condition without negotiations.

The long-standing policy in the healthcare industry is for employees to stay up to date on vaccinations, such as the annual flu shots, but the general rule also allows exceptions for medical reasons, such as allergies.

Elsewhere, St. Louis became the second major city to mandate the wearing of face masks indoors, regardless of vaccination status, and joined Los Angeles in reimposing orders.

“For those who have been vaccinated, this may seem like punishment, a punishment for doing the right thing,” St. Louis County Executive Director Sam Page, a Democrat, said Monday. “I’ve heard it, and I’m so frustrated.”

Dr. Lena Wayne, a former Baltimore health commissioner, said President Joe Biden should “lead by example” and impose more mandates on the federal workforce and in public places where the government has jurisdiction, including planes, trains and federal buildings.

“We need vaccine mandates and vaccine validation,” she said. It’s been too long for the Biden administration to get on board. What we do is not working. Doing more of the same is not the answer here.”

The administration has so far recommended that unvaccinated people continue to wear masks indoors, but top officials over the weekend said they were considering recommending that vaccinators also wear masks indoors.

“We’re going in the wrong direction,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease expert, said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Wayne, who is also an emergency physician and professor at George Washington University, said public health experts have been worried for months about this particular scenario.

“We were worried that the honor system would not work, the unvaccinated would act as if they were vaccinated, and people would think the epidemic was over,” she said. “That’s exactly what happened, and it’s very frustrating.”

Dr Albert Ko, an infectious disease specialist at Yale School, added that the US should not be caught off guard after watching the delta variant sweep across India in May and then land in the UK, Israel and other highly-vaccinated countries forcibly last month. Public Health.

He said: “We have been taught many times not to take anything for granted with COVID.

Jha said Americans should prepare for a few more months of COVID, which has already claimed nearly 611,000 lives in the United States.

“I really thought this was going to be a great summer, but I underestimated the upcoming disinformation campaign,” he said on Monday. “What are the odds that, after more than half a million Americans have died, a third of the country is still unwilling to end the pandemic?”

Vaccinations surged over the weekend, with about 657,000 vaccines reported given Saturday and about 780,000 on Sunday, according to CDC data. The 7-day average circulating on Sunday was about 583,000 vaccines per day, up from about 525,000 in the previous week.

Public health experts said Monday that the slight increase in vaccinations was encouraging but cautioned that it was too early to say whether the millions of unvaccinated people had finally overcome their reservation.

“I wish I could say yes, but I honestly don’t know,” Coe said. “There is a lot of ground to cover.”

Jha said the US is immune to 67% from COVID-19 when previous infections are taken into account, but it would need to get close to 85% to crush the emerging virus.

So we need more vaccinations. Or a lot of injuries,” he said.

The seven-day rolling average of daily new cases in the country has risen over the past two weeks, from more than 19,000 on July 11 to nearly 52,000 on July 25, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

Health experts said they hope that prominent conservative and Republican voices who have spent months questioning the vaccination effort are finally ready to help move the needle.

House Minority Whip Steve Scales and other Republicans at the GOP Doctors Caucus held a news conference at the Capitol late last week imploring their constituents to put their skepticism aside.

Fox News host Sean Hannity declared on his popular show, “It makes perfect sense that so many Americans would get vaccinated. I believe in science. I believe in the science of vaccinations.”

Jha said Facebook also needs to do a better job of removing misinformation on its social networking platform.

And the Food and Drug Administration needs full approval for the COVID-19 vaccines, which currently have emergency approval. He suggested that this final step would give more companies more confidence to enforce vaccine mandates.

“FDA approval is very important,” Jha said. “It is absurd at this point. The safety and efficacy of these drugs are well documented.”

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Lindsey Tanner of The Associated Press in Three Oaks, Michigan; Alexandra Jaffe and Aamir Madani from Washington. Heather Hollingsworth in Mission, Kansas, contributed to this report.

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