Some Hospital Systems End Vaccine Mandates After Recent Court Decisions

Some hospital systems are starting to walk back their COVID-19 staff vaccine mandates due to recent court decisions.

As The Wall Street Journal reported, hospital groups including HCA Healthcare Inc., Tenet Healthcare Corp., and nonprofits such as AdventHealth and the Cleveland Clinic are getting rid of their mandates. According to hospital leaders, public health officials, and nursing organizations, vaccine mandates have contributed to restricting the number of healthcare employees. The outlet also noted that the price of labor has risen, and hospitals have found it difficult to keep workers at all levels as hospitalizations increased. 

The Journal noted, “More recently, thousands of nurses have left the industry or lost their jobs rather than get vaccinated. As of September, 30% of workers at more than 2,000 hospitals across the country surveyed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were unvaccinated.”

“It’s been a mass exodus, and a lot of people in the healthcare industry are willing to go and shop around,” Wade Symons, an employee-benefits lawyer and leader of a consulting firm, said, per the outlet. “If you get certain healthcare facilities that don’t require it, those could be a magnet for those people who don’t want the vaccine. They’ll probably have an easier time attracting labor.”

After courts stopped the federal order, HCA halted its mandate. Tenet and AdventHealth also stated they wouldn’t require workers get vaccinated after the court took action. “Workers in states that mandate vaccination must comply with local laws, HCA and Tenet said,” The Journal added. 

The Cleveland Clinic also said it would halt its vaccine mandate, but it would create precautions like testing for employees who are unvaccinated and tend to patients. 

In late November, a federal judge in Louisiana blocked Biden’s vaccine mandate for health care workers, putting into place an injunction on the order across the country, The Daily Wire reported. 

The Journal reported at the time, “The mandate, issued by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, required all workers at facilities participating in Medicare and Medicaid to get their first shot of the vaccine by Dec. 6 and to have both shots by Jan. 4. The facilities risked losing federal funding if they didn’t comply.”

Louisiana Western District U.S. Judge Terry Doughty wrote, “If the separation of powers meant anything to the Constitutional framers, it meant that the three necessary ingredients to deprive a person of liberty or property – the power to make rules, to enforce them, and to judge their violations – could never fall into the same hands.”

Doughty added, “If the executive branch is allowed to usurp the power of the legislative branch to make laws, two of the three powers conferred by our Constitution would be in the same hands. If human nature and history teach anything, it is that civil liberties face grave risks when governments proclaim indefinite states of emergency.” 

“During a pandemic such as this one, it is even more important to safeguard the separation of powers set forth in our Constitution to avoid erosion of our liberties. Because the Plaintiff States have satisfied all four elements required for a preliminary injunction to issue, this Court has determined that a preliminary injunction should issue against the Government Defendants,” Doughty continued. “This matter will ultimately be decided by a higher court than this one. However, it is important to preserve the status quo in this case. The liberty interests of the unvaccinated requires nothing less.”

As The Daily Wire reported on Monday, in another move in favor of healthcare workers, “[a] federal court denied Democrat President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice on Monday from being able to stop a temporary block on vaccine mandates on healthcare workers.” 

Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt said in a statement: “The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals denied the Department of Justice’s motion for stay pending appeal in our lawsuit against the vaccine mandate on healthcare workers, meaning our injunction will stay in place.”

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