Experts Joined Protect Our Care’s Coronavirus War Room to Explain Why Vaccine Requirements Are Essential to Protect Workers, Patients, and Communities
Washington, DC — Today, legal and public health experts joined Protect Our Care’s Coronavirus War Room for a press call to discuss why the CMS and OSHA vaccine policies are essential to combat the COVID-19 crisis. With Omicron surging through the nation, vaccines remain the most effective tool to reduce infections, hospitalizations and deaths. Just two days before the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on cases attacking these policies, speakers made clear that failure to implement them would severely and irreparably harm patients and workers and undermine the public interest.
“These vaccine requirements are a no-brainer from a health perspective. We know that the vaccines are safe and highly effective in preventing contraction, sickness, and death. We also recognize that workplaces are unique as we bring people together in very close engagement every day,” said Dr. Georges C. Benjamin, Executive Director at the American Public Health Association. “OSHA was designed to ensure that workplaces are safe and their rules give employers the flexibility and employees the confidence they need to go to work in the most risk-free environment possible. Folks who don’t support CMS and OSHA’s rules are wrong on the science, medicine, and law.”
“The pandemic has been with us for almost two years, and we acknowledge that it is going to be endemic,” said Dr. Bob Harrison, a clinical professor of occupational medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. “We can continue working and keeping people safe at work by minimizing viral exposure inside the workplace, and there are two ways to do that: getting as many people vaccinated and boosted as possible and testing those who do not want to get vaccinated and boosted. To be clear, the OSHA regulation is not a mandate. It is vaccination or testing, and it is clear that it works.”
“Health care professionals are there to improve the health of our nation and have a particular obligation to protect this,” said Dr. Darilyn Moyer, Executive Vice President and Chief Executive Officer, American College of Physicians. “We already require recommended vaccinations for health care professionals with less daunting pathogens than COVID-19. We know that these vaccines are incredibly safe and really effective at decreasing disease, decreasing severity of disease, decreasing hospitalization, and decreasing death. The vaccinations are vital to our ability to mitigate the COVID-19, and are the best tool we have in our toolbox.”
“There is a clear scientific consensus that vaccines are by far the best tool we have to protect patients and health care workers, and the CMS regulation mandating vaccinations for health care workers is based on that reality,” said Andrew Pincus, a Visiting Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School and Partner at Mayer Brown LLP. “Sixty public health groups and medical groups representing essentially the entire public health and medical community in this country urged the adoption of this rule. CMS has explicit statutory authority to protect the “health and safety” of Medicare and Medicaid patients, and this rule is an eminently reasonable, completely lawful way to accomplish that critical goal. The Supreme Court should allow the CMS rule to go into effect nationwide to protect patients and health care workers against what is by far the biggest health threat in America’s history.”
“It’s absurd to think that CMS doesn’t have responsibility and can’t police the quality of its facilities. When your mother or grandmother shows up to a hospital, you want it to be as safe as possible,” said Andy Slavitt, Former Acting Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. “This situation is being made controversial by people who want to stir up controversy, but the public is very much supportive of these rules. With one percent of Americans testing positive for COVID-19 each day, this is a crisis beyond imagination. The Supreme Court has to understand that this is the kind of situation that calls for the kind of measures that are being taken.”
“The Occupational Safety and Health Act is a public health measure. Congress added the emergency temporary standard provision to the act to ensure that, in a situation like this, OSHA could act swiftly and decisively to protect workers. The COVID-19 ETS is precisely what Congress envisioned,” said David Vladeck, a professor of law at Georgetown University. “Now, there’s no question that COVID-19 poses a grave danger. OSHA has never faced an agent as deadly and as widespread as COVID-19. Nor is there a serious dispute that a pathogen like COVID-19 is a harmful agent under the act.”
“The lawsuits against the Biden administration vaccine policies are driven by politics, not science. The evidence is clear that vaccines remain the most effective tool to reduce COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations, and deaths,” said Protect Our Care Communications Director Anne Shoup. “With the Omicron variant sweeping across the nation, protecting patients, workers, and our communities is more critical than ever. By challenging these vaccine policies, lawmakers are hurting the economy and putting the lives of millions of workers at risk.”