President Joe Biden said Tuesday he is considering requiring all federal workers to get the COVID-19 vaccine.
The statement came in response to a reporter question after Biden spoke at the office of the Director of National Intelligence.
“We have a pandemic because the unvaccinated, there’s enormous confusion. And the more we learn, the more we learn about this virus, the delta variation, the more we have to be worried, concerned,” President Biden said. “One thing we know for sure, if those other 100 million people got vaccinated, we’d be in a very different world. So get vaccinated. If you haven’t you are not nearly as smart as I said you were.”
The video also shows California Gov. Gavin Newsom talking Tuesday about his state’s new policy requiring state employees and health care workers to get vaccinated or get tested regularly.
“We’re not stopping just with state employees,” Gov. Newsom said. “Today we are also announcing partnerships that include those like Kaiser, private sector now stepping up, organizations representing physicians, dentists, dialysis clinics stepping up, private sector clinics are committing to the same.”
The new rule will take effect next month. There are 246,000 state employees in the state, according to Newsom. There at least 2 million health care workers in the state’s public and private sectors, according to the California controller’s office.
About 62 percent of all eligible Californians are fully vaccinated. However, vaccination rates have stalled, and infections and hospitalizations are rising. The delta variant now makes up an estimated 80 percent of cases in California.
“Our projections are sobering,” Newsom said. “Our projections are over the course of the next number of weeks will show a significant increase in hospitalizations if we continue down this path.”
California’s new policy was originally announced Monday, the same day New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a similar policy for city workers and the Department of Veterans Affairs became the first federal agency to require its healthcare workers receive the vaccine.
96 percent of United States doctors are vaccinated, according to a study from the American Medical Association. However, that’s not the case at nursing homes. Recent Medicare numbers show 60 percent of long-term care facility staff and 70 percent of long-term care residents are vaccinated.
