Workers who secure a religious exemption to the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate will be barred from the lab and allowed only to go on vacation or take leave without pay until they quit their jobs or get vaccinated, according to an all-hands memo from lab Director Thomas Mason.
“On October 15, staff who have been granted a religious exemption will be placed on [leave without pay] status or may use vacation until the Laboratory determines the threat of COVID-19 has diminished sufficiently to allow them to return to work,” Mason wrote in the Sept. 20 memo, the text of which Weapons Complex Morning Briefing saw this week.
Anyone who does decide to begin a COVID-19 vaccination regime by Oct. 1 will be allowed to continue work as normal, “provided they comply with all requirements related to COVID-19, including prompt completion of the vaccination process,” according to Mason’s memo.
Those who don’t inform the lab about their vaccination plans by Oct. 1 will be fired, Mason said.
The lab’s mandate applies to all employees and subcontractors of Triad National Security, the three-way partnership of Battelle, the University of California and Texas A&M University that manages the lab under contract to the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). Even employees who only telework have to get the vaccine.
In August, two weeks before President Joe Biden ordered federal employees and contractors to get vaccinated, Los Alamos became the first civilian nuclear-weapon site to publicly mandate COVID-19 vaccinations for its employees. The move drew a literal protest weeks later, the same week the Biden administration handed down its order that contractors get the vaccine or hit the street. NNSA leadership cheered the mandate.
In his memo to staff, Mason said the lab granted a “small number of medical exemptions” to the vaccine mandate, and that the lab was “working to put in place appropriate accommodations as prescribed by the Americans with Disability Act.”
Relative to the medical exemption requests, the lab received “a larger number of religious exemption requests,” Mason wrote in the memo. He did not say how many religious exemptions Los Alamos had granted.
About 85% of Los Alamos’ workforce had been vaccinated by the time the lab mandated vaccines in August, and another 1,000 people got vaccinated after that, Mason’s memo said.
Following Biden’s executive orders, federal employees at the Department of Energy have until Nov. 8 to get fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Federal contractors government-wide have until Dec. 8 to get vaccinated, according to a guidance released last week by the Safer Federal Workforce Task Force.