Cuomo announces new vaccine mandate for healthcare workers at all hospitals, long-term care facilities in NYS

When COVID ambushed New York last year, New Yorkers acted, while the Federal Government denied the problem. Now, the Delta variant is spreading across the nation and across New York -- new daily positives are up over 1000% over the last six weeks [governor.ny.gov], and over 80 percent of recent positives in New York State are linked to the Delta variant. We must now act again to stop the spread. Our healthcare heroes led the battle against the virus, and now we need them to lead the battle between the variant and the vaccine. We have always followed the science, and we're doing so again today, with these recommendations by Dr. Zucker and federal and state health experts. But we need to do more. I have strongly urged private businesses to implement vaccinated-only admission policies, and school districts to mandate vaccinations for teachers. Neither will occur without the state legally mandating the actions -- private businesses will not enforce a vaccine mandate unless it's the law, and local school districts will be hesitant to make these challenging decisions without legal direction.

While we have made tremendous progress in getting New Yorkers vaccinated, this pandemic is far from over and more must be done. The data and science tell us that getting more people vaccinated as quickly as possible is the best way to keep people safe, prevent further mutations, and enable us to resume our daily routines. This mandate will both help close the vaccination gap and reduce the spread of the Delta variant. I want to thank all New York State's healthcare workers for stepping up once again and showing our state that getting vaccinated is safe, easy, and most importantly, effective.

Vaccinating health care workers to protect against COVID-19 will benefit the most medically vulnerable people in our state and county, especially immunocompromised individuals and children who are not yet eligible for COVID-19 vaccine, and reduce their risk of COVID-19 exposure in hospitals and nursing homes. Increasing the number of Erie County residents and workers who are vaccinated will contribute to a healthier county, a healthier healthcare workforce, and will give patients, nursing home and adult care facility residents, and their families piece of mind that there is an additional layer of protection in these settings.

“We are aware of the Governor’s announcement today about mandating the Covid-19 vaccine. Where we have the ability to create our own policies, we have certainly worked diligently with our workforce to do so. However, when a new law or regulation governs, which happened quite often during the pandemic last year, we follow New York State mandates. That is unless and until additional changes or compromises to those mandates are made.

All that said, we are awaiting official guidance from the New York State Department of Health as to how this will be implemented moving forward. While we want to be compliant, there are obviously many questions and concerns from our workforce that need to be addressed. As an organization overall, we are extremely proud to have reached 81% vaccination for our Phase 1A population.”