Vaccination Requirements Driving Up Vaccination Rates: White House
The White House COVID-19 Response Team said that more than 3,500 organizations including healthcare systems, educational institutions, state and local governments, and private businesses have already stepped up to adopt vaccination requirements.
These vaccination requirements have increased vaccination rates by 20-plus percentage points, with organizations routinely seeing their share of fully vaccinated workers rise above 90 percent, COVID-19 Response Coordinator Jeff Zients said in a briefing.
On Monday, Washington state announced that more than 90 percent of state employees are now fully vaccinated. That’s up from around 49 percent just five weeks ago, with more people getting vaccinated each day ahead of the state’s October 18th deadline.
According to economists at Goldman Sachs, vaccination requirements could help return up to 5 million workers into the labor force as people feel safer going back to the workplace and face fewer disruptions, including to childcare.
Tuesday, Boeing, one of the nation’s largest employers, announced that it will require its 130,000-person U.S. workforce to be fully vaccinated by December 8th.
Zients said that as the FDA and the CDC’s decisions on potential Moderna and J&J boosters come in the coming days, the Biden administration will be ready to hit the ground running as soon as any additional boosters are authorized.
CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said that a study conducted in Maricopa and Pima Counties in Arizona, where schools resumed in-person learning in late July, found that in the first month and a half of learning, there were 113 COVID-19 outbreaks in schools that had no mask requirement and only 16 COVID-19 outbreaks in schools with early mask requirements.
With 120321 new cases reporting on Wednesday, the total number of Covid infections in the country rose to 44,685,145, as per the latest data from Johns Hopkins University.
An additional 3006 Covid deaths on the same day took the total number of people who died due to the pandemic to 719,551.
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