Despite supporting COVID-19 vaccination efforts, the organization believes that employer mandates won’t necessarily lead to higher vaccination uptake and may exacerbate the ongoing staffing crisis, according to Sara Dorner, president of Rockford United Labor, AFL-CIO, which represents more than 25 000 union members in northern Illinois. The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), made up of 57 national and international labor unions representing 12.5 million workers, hasn’t taken an official stance since the “vaccinate or terminate” trend began. “hile I know that some people still disagree with our policy,” Kirby acknowledged in the letter, “United is proving that requiring the vaccine is the right thing to do because it saves lives.” But during the past 2 months, not a single United employee had died from COVID-19. Before the mandate went into effect, COVID-19 accounted for an average of 1 worker death each week. He noted that although some 3000 employees had COVID-19 at the time, no vaccinated workers were hospitalized. “ur vaccine requirement is working-and saving lives,” he wrote. On January 11, in an open letter to the airline’s staff, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Scott Kirby said the positive effects already were evident. United Airlines set a September 27, 2021, vaccination deadline for its US-based employees. Some of the nation’s large employers have instituted COVID-19 vaccine mandates. In his view, “Any company that chooses not to do this is being irresponsible not only to its employees but to its customers.” “While we are not proponents of mandates for everything,” Abraham said, referring to the ACP, “there is no other way to improve our vaccination rates.” Without a federal mandate, Jha said it’s now up to companies to require that their workers be vaccinated. Researchers predict, for example, that a decline in cancer diagnoses during the COVID-19 pandemic may lead to more patients with advanced-stage disease and, down the line, more deaths. With beds in short supply and many staff unable to report to work due to infection or exposure, elective procedures including cancer screenings and surgeries already delayed during the pandemic again are being postponed “by several weeks to a couple of months,” according to Abraham, chief of medicine at Saint Vincent Hospital in Worcester and a professor of medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.įar from a simple inconvenience, those delays in care could have real consequences for patients. Abraham, MD, MPH, president of the American College of Physicians (ACP), painted a similar picture in an interview, describing hospitals across Massachusetts, where he is based, “bursting at the seams” with a surge of largely unvaccinated patients with COVID-19. Internist and infectious disease specialist George M. “Right now, our hospitals are in very big trouble.” If the US had instituted vaccine mandates last summer and everyone eligible had received a booster dose by the fall, “our hospitals would be in a very different shape,” said Jha, a general internist and attending physician at the Providence VA Medical Center. Yet a third of people aged 5 years or older in the US haven’t received a primary COVID-19 vaccine series, including more than a quarter of adults.
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