Get Police Vaccinated
President Joe Biden announced last week that his administration will require nursing homes to vaccinate their employees against COVID-19 or risk losing Medicare and Medicaid funding. These workers care for especially vulnerable individuals residing in high-risk, congregate settings—and unfortunately, their current rate of vaccination is far too low to protect those with whom they work. Mandating vaccination of nursing-home employees is a lifesaving, commonsense policy, and Biden should now apply its logic to a variety of workers in other fields who similarly interact each day with other vulnerable populations: employees of jails, prisons, Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers, and police departments.
Like nursing homes, each of these institutions on . They have also been , since of the pandemic, for many of the biggest COVID-19 outbreaks in the world. Not only has this reality harmed to the safety of police and . At prison workers have gotten COVID-19, of illness seen in the general population. In spite of this, prison administrators have failed to successfully achieve high rates of vaccination among their staff; in most states that report these data, .
