There “has been some uncertainty” in developing guidelines for Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff to request religious or medical exemptions from the Joe Biden administration’s federal COVID-19 vaccine mandate, an NRC official said at a virtual all-hands meeting Tuesday morning.
“I think we’re very close on the guidelines for the medical exemption,” the agency’s newly appointed operations director, Daniel Dorman, said. “I think there’s still work to be done on the religious exemption.”
The agency is awaiting further guidance from the White House’s Safer Federal Workforce Task Force, which is overseeing the vaccine mandate, an NRC spokesperson told Weapons Complex Morning Briefing via email Tuesday.
Once guidelines for exceptions are in place, those who refuse to get vaccinated and aren’t exempted from the mandate will face “progressive discipline,” Dorman said.
Agency staff, who submitted questions ahead of the meeting, raised concerns that “the agency is slow-walking requests to see who really is willing to get fired.”
“There’s no hidden agenda here,” NRC Chair Christopher Hanson responded. “We don’t want to lose anybody as part of this. We want people to come back to work if they’re able to get vaccinated, with certain exceptions, and to come back and fully participate as part of the workforce.”
For now, NRC is accepting exemption requests but has stopped processing them, said the agency’s chief human capital officer Mary Lamary. The Safer Federal Workplace Task Force directed federal agencies to pause processing, Lamary said.
Despite the agency’s deliberations over vaccine exemptions, the majority of staff have already gotten the jab. 77% of NRC employees have sent their vaccination cards to the commission, Hanson said. That number is up from earlier this month, when a spokesperson told Weapons Complex Morning Briefing that just over half of agency staff were fully vaxxed.
Meanwhile, NRC plans to have all of its staff return to work in-person by Nov. 7. That date applies to the commission’s Rockville, Md. headquarters as well as its four regional offices and technical training center.
