Six weeks after telling unvaccinated feds and contractors to wear masks and be tested regularly for COVID-19, President Joe Biden on Thursday took things a step further and said such workers must either take the vaccine or find another job.
“If you want to work with the federal government, do business with us, get vaccinated,” Biden said during a half-hour speech.
The president attributed much of the current surge in the so-called Delta variant to the nearly 80 million Americans, roughly 25% of the population, yet to take a single dose of the vaccine. “That 25% can cause a lot of damage and they are,” Biden said.
An executive order titled “Ensuring Adequate COVID Safety Protocols for Federal Contractors,” was issued shortly after the speech. The order says new safeguards “will decrease the spread of COVID-19, which will decrease worker absence, reduce labor costs, and improve the efficiency of contractors and subcontractors at sites where they are performing work for the Federal Government.”
When the contractor vaccine mandate arrives, it will not be written into federal contracts directly. Instead, agencies will modify prime contracts — with contractors obliged to flow the requirements down to subcontractors at all levels — to require compliance with directives to be written by the Safer Federal Workforce Task Force Biden created in January.
At deadline Friday, fewer than 24 hours after Biden issued the executive order, both the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and the office of Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm declined to say when they would modify existing nuclear-weapons site-management contracts to include the clause required by the order. The clause would automatically be required in most new contracts and for any existing contracts that are extended or renewed, including through the exercise of options.
Once the clause is in, according to the executive order, contractors and subcontractors will “for the duration of the contract, comply with all guidance for contractor or subcontractor workplace locations published by the Safer Federal Workforce Task Force.”
The task force was to roll out its new COVID-19 guidance by Sept. 24.
Other than the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which had already mandated COVID-19 vaccinations by Oct. 15, no NNSA nuclear-weapons site reached this week by Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor had required inoculation as a condition of employment.
A spokesperson for the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico said the labs network “follows all federal guidance to help provide the safest work environment possible.”
Vaccination also was not a condition of employment for the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, or the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., a spokesperson for Consolidated Nuclear Security, the prime for both sites, wrote Friday in an email. Ditto at the Nevada National Security Site, a spokesperson for that site’s Honeywell-led prime Mission Support and Test Services said. However, all three sites included a caveat in their statements that vaccination was not required as of the four o’clock hour on Thursday, Eastern time. Biden unveiled his executive order at 5 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday.
Spokespersons for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Kansas City National Security Campus declined to comment about vaccine policies this week.
At the Savannah River Site, operations contractor Savannah River Nuclear Solutions plans to require vaccinations in October. The NNSA passes money through the team’s contract, which is owned by DOE’s Office of Environmental Management.
Meanwhile, the parent companies of big DOE contractors largely planned to keep quiet until the Safer Federal Workforce Task Force published new guidelines.
“We are still assessing and evaluating the details of this new mandate to determine how we can help our unvaccinated employees meet this requirement as efficiently as possible,” Huntington Ingalls Industries President and CEO Mike Petters said in a statement. “The two priorities that will guide our response are keeping our employees safe and supporting our customers.”
“We have yet to see specific guidance requiring government contractors to be vaccinated against COVID 19,” said Huntington Ingalls spokeswoman Beci Brenton in an email.
“The safety, security and health of our workers is always Fluor’s number one priority,” a company spokesperson said Friday in a prepared statement. “We are following the COVID-19 situation closely and each of our project sites is following the direction of the U.S. government to ensure the safety of the entire workforce.
A BWX Technologies spokesman, Jud Simmons, said the company has “strongly encouraged” employees to get vaccinated and opened clinics at some worksites. “We are reviewing the President’s plan, and once we receive further, detailed guidance from the government, we will fully comply with the directives that apply to us as a U.S. government contractor and/or employer of more than 100 people.”
President Biden’s move toward mandating inoculation at federal workplaces is hardly a surprise given the increasingly hardened tone from the White House recently.
“We have been patient but our patience is wearing thin,” Biden said this week. He also said businesses employing 100 people or more must soon have any unvaccinated workers tested on a regular basis.
Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) tweeted his support of Biden’s action, saying it was a decisive move “that will save lives …The more people that get vaccinated, the sooner this will be over.”
By contrast, Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) said in a press release that Biden is mishandling the pandemic.
“[T]he government should not be mandating vaccines for private companies,” Wilson said. “Private companies should be able to make this decision for themselves.”
Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.), another lawmaker with a Savannah River-adjacent constituency, also voiced his opposition to mandates via Twitter. “I am not anti-vaccine, but I am anti-vaccine mandate,” Duncan said. “A forced vaccine is an infringement of liberty/medical privacy & should never be a condition for employment.”
Hundreds of anti-vaccine-mandate protesters brought a similar message to a park in Los Alamos this week, where local media reported that some lab employees showed up to speak out against the lab’s decision to require personnel to get vaccinated or get fired.
At deadline Friday, the U.S. has experienced more than 40.5 million cases of COVID-19 and 654,000 deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
