State officials stated Friday that the implementation of New York’s COVID-19 booster injection mandate for medical professionals, which was supposed to begin Monday, will be postponed for at least three months due to fears that it would cause staffing shortages.
According to state Department of Health statistics, up to 25% of New York’s health-care staff was on the verge of missing the Monday deadline to get the booster injection or risk losing their jobs.
State officials, according to Bassett, will continue to work with health providers to enhance medical professionals’ use of COVID-19 booster shots, including plans to make more booster doses accessible in care settings.
The Health Department indicated that state officials aim to reassess in three months if more efforts are needed to enhance booster rates among the health care workforce, but did not specify whether this included implementing the booster mandate.
The highly contagious omicron version was fuelling a winter surge in coronavirus illnesses that peaked at roughly 90,000 instances in one day when New York’s medical-worker booster mandate was first announced on Jan. 7. The decision to postpone the mandate comes as the number of cases has dropped dramatically in the last month, hovering at 4,000 per day.
Nevertheless, the requirement that all New York health-care employees be properly vaccinated remained in force, requiring two doses of the Moderna or Pfizer-BioNtech vaccines or one Johnson & Johnson dose. It went into effect in late September, forcing 34,000 medical employees, or 3% of the workforce, to resign or be fired rather than take the shots.
Despite opposition from many health care executives at the time, Gov. Kathy Hochul implemented the first vaccine requirement in September, despite concerns about the impact on the workplace.
