Coronavirus | Thousands of unvaccinated workers facing job loss

Oct 19 Reuters - Thousands of unvaccinated workers across the United States are facing potential job loss as a growing number of states, cities and private companies start to enforce mandates for inoculation against COVID - 19.

In the latest high-profile case, Washington State University fired its head football coach and four of his assistants for failing to comply with the state's vaccine requirement. The coach, Nick Rolovich, applied earlier this month for a religious exemption from the mandate.

Thousands of police officers and firefighters in cities like Chicago and Baltimore are also at risk of losing their jobs in the coming days under mandates that require them to report their vaccination status or submit to regular coronavirus testing.

While hesitant, the mandates have been effective at convincing many hesitant workers to get vaccine against the virus that has killed more than 700,000 people in the United States. More than 77% of eligible Americans have received at least one shot of vaccine, White House response coordinator Jeff Zients told reporters last week.

Until now Mayor Lori Lightfoot is fighting with the Chicago Police Union that came out against the public health mandate of vaccines. About a third of the city's 12,770 police officers have missed a Friday deadline to report their vaccination status, and some officers have been put on no-pay status.

What is all this all about? It's about maximizing the opportunity to create a safe workplace, Lightfoot said on Monday, accusing the union of tying to induce an insurrection by opposing the mandate.

John Catanzara Fraternal Order of Police union president does not respond to a request for comment.

The White House, which announced major vaccine requirements in a bid to reduce hospitalizations and deaths from COVID - 19 in the wake of a surge driven by the highly contagious Delta variant of coronavirus, has been a major catalyst behind the inoculation push.

On Friday, 200 Boeing Co employees and others staged a protest over the pilot's request that 125,000 workers be vaccinated on December 8 by president Joe Biden under an executive order issued for federal contractors.

The rules for another order applicable to private companies with 100 or more employees are expected to be finalized soon.

Along with the mandate for federal workers and contractors, Biden's vaccine requirements cover about 100 million people, about two-thirds of the U.S. workforce.

The White House has met with executives of several private companies to discuss Biden's vaccine plan.

A wave of layoffs has already swept through the healthcare industry, which moved more quickly than others to impose vaccine mandates given the heightened COVID - 19 exposure risk for patients and staff.

Recent nurses who chose to leave their jobs rather than get immunized told Reuters that they could not get past their concern over a lack of long-term data on the three vaccines available in the United States.

While the vaccines received Emergency Use Authorization from the Food and Drug Administration in less than a year, medical experts have widely vouched for their safety, citing years of research, large clinical trials and real world data after hundreds of millions has been vaccinated worldwide.

Like WSU's Rolovich, many unvaccinated workers seeking exemption have done so on religious grounds. It was not clear how a University Committee of weighing such exemptions ruled in his case.

School leaders said the mandate aimed at ensuring the safety of its faculty and staff.

Experience is showing that vaccine mandates help motivate people to complete the vaccination process, Marty Dickinson, WSU Board of Regents Chair, said in a statement.