After months of legal wrangling and more than a year’s worth of proof that COVID-19 vaccines protect residents and healthcare workers, governors of two states now want to kick the can down the road on mandate compliance. Again.
In a letter to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services earlier this week, Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin (R) and West Virginia’s Jim Justice (R) asked for a six-month delay of the rule or for flexibility in enforcement.
They cited an urgent staffing crisis.
But theirs is the same staffing crisis affecting nearly every provider in the nation. Many of those have already adopted their own mandates. Others complied with state rules without seeing staff numbers plummet.
CMS, amid lengthy legal wrangling, also already extended its vaccination dates and added fail safes for well-intentioned and hard-working facilities that can’t drive their numbers up quickly enough. Leaders at those buildings will have 90 days to achieve full compliance before penalties kick in, the agency has said.
In Justice’s state, workers don’t even have to get their first shot until Feb. 13. That’s nearly half a year since CMS announced it would roll out an emergency regulation requiring staff vaccinations.
How much longer should residents have to wait to feel fully protected? When will we given them confidence that their caregivers are in healthcare to support patient health?
What ambivalent workers need is a final deadline. Instead of making vaccination feel like a do-or-die decision, let’s get behind some do-and-not-die messaging.
Those who have a legitimate reason for exemption can follow established pathways to seek those. Those who don’t and still refuse a shot should be on the pathway to another profession.
I feel for citizens of states where staffing crises may continue to limit speedy access to care. I recognize providers have spent the last few months trying valiantly to plug holes in their human resource networks.
My sympathy, however, doesn’t extend to politicians or parties that have downplayed the importance of vaccination or tried to limit the use of masks, mandates or other provisions shown to limit COVID-19’s impact.
What is the end game in asking for another mandate extension now? To delay, deny and deflect until COVID is over and there’s no longer a need for vaccination? As a broad swath of scientists have solidly predicted, COVID is likely here to stay. Even as it fades into the background, the virus will continue to plague vulnerable populations, many of them regulars in the healthcare system.
Nowhere is that more true than in the nursing home setting. Residents’ layered vulnerability makes them deserving of caregivers who put them first. They have done their part to ensure protection by getting vaccinated and boosted in large numbers, following lockdown rules and forgoing visits and hugs from loved ones for months on end.
Residents and their families have waited long enough for this final show of respect. They’ve persisted through various waves, the squeezing and easing of restrictions, and through months of false hopes that vaccination mandate extensions would end.
We all know that workers who are vaccine hesitant today may claim to be vaccine hesitant in six months. Would Youngkin and Justice come back for more time then?
Or, since they claim to accept the Supreme Court’s decision allowing the vaccine mandate to proceed, would they finally be willing to force workers to choose?
From the looks of it, staffing will be no less an issue then. With residential care settings down some 420,000 workers since early 2020, there is unending recruitment to be done. Many workers fled nursing homes early on when they appeared to be dangerous settings for COVID outbreaks, long before the prospect of required vaccines even surfaced.
It’s time to let the chips fall where they may and to begin offering residents the reassurance of safety in their home. Afterall, a safer workplace is also a more attractive workplace.
Kimberly Marselas is senior editor of McKnight’s Long-Term Care News.
Opinions expressed in McKnight’s Long-Term Care columns are not necessarily those of McKnight’s.
