President Joe Biden recently announced that companies with more than 100 employees must require their workers to be fully vaccinated or test weekly. Biden also announced all federal workers must be vaccinated with no option for weekly testing as a substitute. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is tasked with enforcing the mandates.
These rules will affect over 50,000 federal workers in Alabama. Some major companies in Alabama including Tyson Foods and Walmart are requiring all of their employees to be fully vaccinated.
This comes as cases of COVID-19 continue to grow and just after the full FDA approval of the Pfizer vaccine. Dr. Dan Milner is the Chief Medical Officer of the American Society for Clinical Pathology. Milner said because of the uncertain threshold for achieving herd immunity, the US needs to get as many people vaccinated as possible.
“That herd immunity concept is becoming even more crucial, and we don’t – we will figure out what that number is on the other side of this," he said. "For the time being, we need to keep pushing, pushing, pushing for everyone to be vaccinated so we can drop those numbers down, get the case rate low enough. And then we can say ‘Ah, we’ve achieved herd immunity, and guess what? That number was’ whatever it is.”
Milner said vaccine mandates are not a new phenomenon.
“Smallpox, polio – those were eradicated because of vaccination. Measles mumps rubella is required to be in college or high school right? So vaccine mandates are not new," he said. "The fact that Biden has made a vaccine mandate is just in line with what public health has been doing in this country for decades and decades.”
The Biden Administration claims the mandates have a legal footing, citing a 1970 law allowing OHSA to enforce an emergency temporary standard. The temporary measure will be enforced for six months, after which a permanent regulation will be put in place.
