Report: Large Hospital Systems Scrap Vaccine Mandates Following Biden Federal Court Smackdown

Several large U.S. hospital systems have scrapped their coronavirus vaccine mandates following a federal judge’s smackdown of President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for healthcare workers, according to a Monday report from the Wall Street Journal.

The report states:

Hospital operators including HCA Healthcare Inc. HCA +0.55% and Tenet Healthcare Corp. THC +1.25% as well as nonprofits AdventHealth and the Cleveland Clinic are dropping the mandates. …Vaccine mandates have been a factor constraining the supply of healthcare workers, according to hospital executives, public-health authorities and nursing groups.

According to the report, hospitals were already grappling with work shortages before the pandemic, only to be “compound by burnout” and higher paying short-term nursing contracts, which drew nurses to coronavirus hot spots.

Subsequently, thousands of healthcare workers have quit or lost their jobs rather than get jabbed — the Journal cited a September Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study that found that 3o percent of workers at more than 2,000 hospitals across the country remained unvaccinated.

Wade Symons, an employee-benefits lawyer and head of consulting firm Mercer’s U.S. regulatory practice, said:

It’s been a mass exodus, and a lot of people in the healthcare industry are willing to go and shop around. If you get certain healthcare facilities that don’t require it, those could be a magnet for those people who don’t want the vaccine. They’ll probably have an easier time attracting labor.”

A federal judge blocked Biden’s vaccine mandate for healthcare workers in November, saying that the “separation of powers” created by the Founding Fathers barred a single branch of government from depriving people of “liberty or property,” noting that “indefinite states of emergency” can be abused by the Executive branch to deprive people of such rights.

The mandate, which is estimated to impact 10 million workers, ordered that healthcare workers receive at least one shot of the vaccine by December 6 and both doses by January 4, 2022. According to the report, the American Hospital Association estimates that 42 percent of U.S. hospitals, “some 2,640 facilities,” have coronavirus vaccine mandates.

“I don’t think the mandates were helpful and I think the court in Louisiana did everyone a service,” Alan Levine told the publication. Levine is the chief executive officer of Ballad Health, which runs more than 20 hospitals in Virginia and Tennessee. He told the Journal that out of 14,000 employees, 2,000 are unvaccinated, and firing them would be “devastating” to the system. 

HCA, which is reportedly “among the country’s largest healthcare providers,” suspended its vaccine requirement after Biden’s mandate was blocked in court.

“We continue to strongly encourage our colleagues to be vaccinated as a critical step to protect individuals from the virus,” HCA spokesman Harlow Sumerford said, adding that approximately 275,000 employees are fully vaccinated.

AdventHealth, Tenet, Intermountain Healthcare, and Cleveland Clinic also rescinded their vaccine mandates following the federal judge’s decision, though not all hospital systems have done so. According to the report:

Kaiser Permanente, which runs 39 hospitals and hundreds of medical offices in California and other states and employs nearly 210,000 people, said it gave employees until Dec. 1 to get vaccinated. So far, 98% of staff are vaccinated, but on Wednesday the hospital system terminated 352 employees, and another 1,500 face termination in early January unless they become fully vaccinated or receive an exemption.

New York state’s largest healthcare provider, Northwell Health, has also maintained its mandate and had fired 1,400 unvaccinated employees by October. 

“We will not hire anyone who has not been vaccinated,” a spokesman told the Journal.