ation , as well as an associate professor at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School states , “ In specific industries , yes . For example , for nursing homes and hospitals , whether or how to implement vaccine mandates is a major consideration . Only about 62 percent of nursing home and long-term care staff are fully or partially vaccinated . While a vaccine requirement could go a long way toward protecting residents and stopping outbreaks , many nursing home administrators believe it could also lead to a mass exodus of workers for other industries . President Biden ’ s announcement on September 9 requires twothirds of U . S . workers to get vaccinated . This could make it easier for employers to enforce vaccine requirements because workers would have fewer employment options .”
Mandatory Influenza Vaccination : The Precedent for COVID-19 Mandates ?
Jennifer Bridges , the RN suing her former healthcare system over the COVID-19 vaccine mandate , says that Houston Methodist Hospital also required influenza vaccination as a condition of employment .
“ They have mandated the flu vaccine for years , says Bridges , who was employed by the healthcare system for eight years before her termination . “ Their protocol was that you had to take the flu shot . If you had a medical or religious reason for declination , there was no question , you would just turn it in . They would accept it and then all they did was ask you to wear surgical masks through flu season and it was no big deal .”
Bridges says she accepted the influenza vaccine yearly without question . “ I did take it , as I ’ ve never been anti-vaccination when I was comfortable with the composition of the vaccine ,” Bridges says . “ I ’ ll be honest , I never took it before being employed by Houston Methodist , but I just took it because I didn ’ t have a way out and I thought it was a safe . I didn ’ t feel anything was wrong with the flu vaccines . With the COVID-19 vaccines , we don ’ t know enough about the long-term effects yet , and to mandate them before we have fully vetted the science , is wrong . The mandate began while the vaccines were still under the FDA ’ s EUA . Too many people are trying to discredit and invalidate our concerns . I will personally never take the COVID-19 vaccine , as I have natural immunity and I will trust my own immune system . I do not trust the medical field at all anymore , unless it ’ s one of the physicians that I ’ ve been working with who are looking for more answers .”
Not surprisingly , mandatory influenza vaccination policies of healthcare personnel in healthcare settings consistently yield influenza vaccine uptake rates above 90 percent , and many experts point to flu shot uptake as a path toward COVID-19 vaccine compliance .
“ This is not new ,” emphasizes UNC Medical Center ’ s David Weber . “ Many vaccines at our health system and across the U . S . are conditions of employment going back decades now , with mumps , measles , rubella , varicella , tetanus diphtheria , pertussis and then we added influenza . Schools , many universities , and the military all have required vaccination , in addition to healthcare , so , this is not new . What is new to me is the politicization of these requirements . Let ’ s look at flu shots . We have something like 13,500 employees at UNC , and we have required , as a condition of employment , flu shots for a decade now . Each year , of all those
• Not surprisingly , mandatory influenza vaccination policies of healthcare personnel in healthcare settings consistently yield influenza vaccine uptake rates above 90 %, and many experts point to flu shot uptake as a path toward COVID-19 vaccine compliance . employees , somewhere between five and 10 employees on average choose not to get immunized . We exempt them , as we do with the COVID vaccines , if they have a medical contraindication or religious objection . That has been on average somewhere in the range of 2 percent to 3 percent . So , it ’ s a very small number of people who have asked for and were granted an exemption . And then of people who weren ’ t given one of those two exemptions because they didn ’ t qualify , somewhere in the range of five to 10 people would choose not to work for us anymore . Of those , virtually all of them were those already under disciplinary action , going to retire in the next few weeks , or part-time people working a single shift a month – virtually never a full-time employee .”
Weber continues , “ Also what ’ s new is the sheer number of people who are objecting to the COVID vaccine , one of which is now FDA approved , just like all the other vaccines we use , at least the Pfizer vaccine is , and this is from politicization of vaccine requirements . I remember the polio vaccine campaigns in the 1950s , when it was like a Duke-UNC football game and people literally spent two nights sitting in front of the gymnasiums to get their kids immunized there and had we had the same degree of vaccine hesitancy that we have now ; we still have polio with us and back in the 1950s , with a much smaller U . S . population , we had 20,000 people each year in the hospitals with paralytic polio . I suspect very few Americans want to go back to that , but I saw the statistic that that 1 in 500 Americans have now died of COVID , so it certainly dwarfs the toll that we saw with polio .”
Experts report that even though influenza vaccination uptake may not be directly reflective of the COVID-19 vaccine uptake , “ prior surveys have demonstrated that the most significant predictor for the acceptance of COVID-19 vaccine was acceptance of influenza vaccine . Although vaccine acceptance among healthcare personnel is higher than among non-HCP , vaccine skepticism and hesitancy are common among medical staff ,” observe Kang , et al . ( 2021 ).
In their study , these researchers found that vaccination uptake rate declined significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic , with 13,853 ( 55.7 percent ) HCP vaccinated , 1,027 ( 4.1 percent ) declined , and 10,010 ( 40.2 percent ) with incomplete surveys during the 2020-2021 influenza season compared with 15,757 ( 63.5 percent ) vaccinated , 664 ( 2.7 percent ) declined , and 8,393 ( 33.8 percent ) with incomplete surveys during the 2019-2020 influenza season . Safety and / or side effects were the most common reason for declining , followed by “ vaccine does not prevent flu ,” and “ vaccine gives flu .” In their analysis , occupational role was associated with influenza declination for both the 2019-2020 and the 2020-2021 influenza season . Physicians and advanced practice providers had low influenza declination rates , whereas personnel in nutrition services and administrative personnel had high declination rates .
Talbot , et al . ( 2020 ) say that a “ thoughtful , step-wise implementation of a mandatory immunization program linked to professional accountability can be successful in increasing immunization rates as well as overall compliance with policy requirements to cover all recommended HCP immunizations .”
In this study , Talbot , et al . ( 2020 ) evaluated a mandatory immunization program to increase and sustain high immunization coverage for healthcare personnel in a tertiary-care academic