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Nursing home staff will have to get vaccinated against COVID-19 or risk losing federal Medicare and Medicaid funding for their facilities, the Associated Press reported.
President Joe Biden is expected to announce the action Wednesday afternoon at the White House in an effort to curtail continuing vaccine hesitancy among certain groups. First reported by CNN, an unnamed senior administration official confirmed that the announcement would come from the administration, according to AP.
The order will come as a regulation from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). It could go into effect as early as September.
The nursing home staff mandate is the latest move from the Biden administration to spur vaccination rates among those who have yet to receive the shot. In July, the president announced that federal workers would have to attest that they are vaccinated on signed forms, or follow certain guidelines on masking, weekly testing and social distancing, AP reported.
"Right now, too many people are dying or watching someone they love die and say, 'If I'd just got the vaccine,'" Biden said in an address at the White House. "This is an American tragedy. People are dying who don't have to die."
For more reporting from the Associated Press, see below.
Hundreds of thousands of nursing home workers are not vaccinated, according to federal data, despite those facilities bearing the brunt of the early COVID-19 outbreak and their workers being among the first in the country to be eligible for shots.
It comes as the Biden administration seeks to raise the costs for those who have yet to get vaccinated, after months of incentives and giveaways proved to be insufficient to drive tens of millions of Americans to roll up their sleeves.
In just the past three weeks, Biden has forced millions of federal workers to attest to their vaccination status or face onerous new requirements, with even stricter requirements for federal workers in front-line health roles, and his administration has moved toward mandating vaccines for the military as soon as next month.
Biden has also celebrated businesses that have mandated vaccines for their own workforces and encouraged others to follow, and highlighted local vaccine mandates as a condition for daily activities, like indoor dining.
The new effort seems to be paying off, as the nation's rate of new vaccinations has nearly doubled over the past month. More than 200 million Americans have now received at least one dose of the vaccines, according to the White House, however, about 80 million Americans are eligible but haven't yet been vaccinated.
Last year CMS used similar regulatory authority to prohibit most visitors from nursing homes in an effort to protect residents.
About the writer
Zoe Strozewski is a Newsweek reporter based in New Jersey. Her focus is reporting on U.S. and global politics. Zoe ... Read more