As the omicron coronavirus variant sweeps the nation, the Biden administration will ask the Supreme Court to greenlight sweeping vaccination requirements for health workers and employees of large private businesses.
"The Secretary found that unvaccinated staff at healthcare facilities pose a serious threat to the health and safety of patients because the virus that causes COVID-19 is highly transmissible and dangerous," HHS writes in court documents.
"There's something called the power of the purse. If we see a hospital, or a nursing home [that] ... has some pathogen flying around that they're not dealing with. We have the ability to say, 'no, you can't allow a Medicare beneficiary to go there because they'll get sick or they'll risk getting sick,'" said Andy Slavitt, former acting administrator of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services during the Obama administration.
Ten GOP-led states challenging the HHS mandate warn of"disastrous consequences" for health systems in rural areas withover workers refusing to get the shot. “That’s quite the opposite of promoting patients’ ‘health and safety,’” they write in court documents. The U.S. continues to average more new cases per day than at any other point in the pandemic, federal data shows.
"Why those are certainly tragic numbers is that a lot of that is preventable," said Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association."They're some of the safest vaccines, and most studied vaccines that we have today, and they're highly effective."
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