Reuters - Thousands of unvaccinated workers across the United States are facing potential job losses as a growing number of states, cities and private companies begin to enforce mandates on inoculation against COVID - 19.
On Monday, 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, had applied for a religious exemption from the mandate earlier this month.
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 controversial, the mandates have been effective at convincing many hesitant workers to get vaccinated against the virus which has killed more than 700,000 people in the United States. Some 77% of eligible Americans have got at least one shot of vaccine, White House COVID - 19 response coordinator Jeff Zients told reporters last week.
In Chicago, mayor Lori Lightfoot is battling the police union in Chicago that came out against the vaccine mandate for city workers. About a third of the city's 12,770 officers have missed a Friday deadline to report their vaccination status, and some police officers have been put on "no pay" status.
What this all is about is saving lives, and ultimately, what we want to accomplish? It's about maximizing the opportunity to create a safe workplace, Lightfoot said on Monday, accusing the union of tying up to induce an insurrection by opposing the mandate.
Fraternal Order of Police union President John Catanzara did not answer a request for comment.
The White House, which announced sweeping 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 the coronavirus, has been a major catalyst behind the vaccination push.
On Friday, some 200 Boeing Co employees and others staged a protest over the planemaker's requirement that 125,000 employees be vaccinated by December 8 under an executive order by President Joe Biden for federal contractors.
The rules for another order applying to other business with 100 employees or more workers are expected to be finalized soon.
As with the mandate for federal workers and contractors, Biden's vaccine requirements will cover nearly 100 million people, about two-thirds of the U.S. workforce.
The White House has been meeting with senior executives of several private companies to discuss Biden's vaccination plan.
A wave of layoffs swept through the healthcare industry, which moved faster than others to impose vaccine mandates given the heightened COVID-19 exposure risk for patients and staff.
Nurses and other healthcare workers who had chosen to leave their jobs rather than be immunized recently told Reuters they could not get past their concern over a lack of long-term data regarding 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 of millions have been vaccinated worldwide.
Wie WSU's Rolovich, some unvaccinated workers who seek exemption have done so on religious grounds. It was not clear how a University committee in charge of weighing such exemptions ruled in his case.
School leaders said the mandate was intended to ensure safety of its faculty and staff.
Experience has shown that vaccine mandates motivate people to complete the vaccination process, Marty Dickinson, WSU Board of Regents Chair, said in a statement.