Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Who Pays? Vax-Or-Test Order Raises Questions Over Implementation
AP: Federal Mandate Takes Vaccine Decision Off Employers' Hands
Larger U.S. businesses now won’t have to decide whether to require their employees to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Doing so is now federal policy. ... Large swaths of the private sector have already stepped in to mandate shots for at least some of their employees. But Biden said Thursday that “many of us are frustrated with the nearly 80 million Americans who are not fully vaccinated.” ... The Associated Press reached out to a wide range of companies on Thursday. Many didn’t have immediate responses while others noted that they already require vaccinations. Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, was one of the first major companies to mandate vaccines for some of its workers. Walmart said in late July that it was requiring that all workers at its headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, as well as its managers who travel within the U.S.; be vaccinated against COVID-19 by Oct. 4. (Ortutay, 9/10)
Bloomberg: Businesses Question Logistics, Cost Of Biden Vaccine Plan
U.S. companies grappling with the thorny issue of whether to require worker vaccinations against Covid-19 say the U.S. government needs to provide more details about a new, far-reaching mandate announced Thursday. President Joe Biden’s directive requires vaccinations for all executive-branch employees, federal contractors and millions of health-care workers, while large private employers must either mandate shots or provide weekly testing. Businesses are now digesting the order, but there are concerns over what the mandate may entail. (Roeder, 9/10)
The New York Times: New Mandate Raises Question: Who’ll Pay For All The Covid Tests?
Spurred by persistently high Covid case numbers and only modest vaccination rates, the Biden administration announced Thursday a new effort to combat the pandemic. It intends to mandate that workers at large companies get vaccinated, or submit to regular testing. The rule applies to tens of millions of Americans, about two-thirds of the country’s work force. And it raises a thorny question: Who pays for those coronavirus tests? (Kliff, 9/9)
The Baltimore Sun: Many Maryland Business Groups, Unions Back Biden’s COVID-19 Mandates, With Some Caveats
As COVID-19 cases began to rise over the summer, Maryland manufacturers faced a wrenching choice. They could require employees to be vaccinated — a mandate that some companies feared could cause defiant workers to quit. Or they could forgo a mandate and then “they’ve got a bigger problem” if an outbreak developed, said Mike Galiazzo, president of the Regional Manufacturing Institute of Maryland, an advocacy group. (Barker, 9/9)
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The New York Times: Biden’s New Vaccine Push Is A Fight For The U.S. Economy
President Biden’s aggressive move to expand the number of vaccinated Americans and halt the spread of the Delta variant is not just an effort to save lives. It is also an attempt to counter the continuing and evolving threat that the virus poses to the economy. ... After weeks of playing down the threat that a new wave of infections posed to the recovery, the president and his team blamed Delta for slowing job growth in August. “We’re in a tough stretch,” he conceded on Thursday, after heralding the economic progress made under his administration so far this year, “and it could last for a while.” (Tankersley, 9/9)
