Biden’s employer vaccination laws are “important to making a protected work setting,” says Dr. Ashish Jha
Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, applauded President Joe Biden’s efforts to increase vaccine mandates for millions of US workers.
“People don’t want to change jobs, people don’t want to be inconvenienced,” Jha said on CNBC’s The News with Shepard Smith.
“I think the vast majority of people who are not vaccinated end up being vaccinated with these things. I know they are seen as a mandate, I think they are absolutely essential to create safe work environments.”
Biden announced Thursday that the Department of Labor will work to enact an emergency rule requiring all employers with more than 100 workers to ensure their workforce is either fully vaccinated or tested at least once a week. The new requirement will affect up to 80 million Americans.
The president also ordered that around 17 million workers in healthcare facilities receiving Medicare or Medicaid be fully vaccinated. In addition, all federal employees and contractors doing business with the executive branch must now be fully vaccinated. Previously, federal employees had the choice of having regular tests rather than getting vaccinated.
Jha told the host Shepard Smith that he “doesn’t want to be in a closed office with a bunch of unvaccinated people, I think that would be unnecessarily dangerous.”
Despite the government’s nationwide push for Covid vaccinations, just over 176 million Americans, or 53.3% of the total population, are fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC also released new data showing a 10-fold increase in hospital admissions in U.S. children and adolescents since the advent of the Delta variant.
Stressing that the reason children are infected is because the adults around them are unvaccinated, Jha reiterated that the most important thing we can do to protect children is to get adults vaccinated.
“Obviously, if you look at children under the age of 12, no one under 12 is vaccinated, and yet the infection rates and hospitalization rates in Florida are ten times higher than in Massachusetts,” Jha said. “It’s not because these children are vaccinated, but because the adults around them are vaccinated.
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