Editorial: Employers need to require COVID-19 vaccination for health care workers

Health care workers are heroes of the pandemic.

In hospitals, they comforted patients who otherwise would die alone. During the depths of the winter of COVID-19, they worked long, excruciating shifts to treat patients who lined hallways and overfilled emergency rooms.

They put themselves and their families at risk, and COVID-19 killed more than 3,600 of them, according to an investigation of health care worker deaths in the pandemic's first year by Kaiser Health News and The Guardian.

In December, they had first access to a vaccine that offered powerful protection, and who could argue with that?

But three months after that, just 52% of front-line health care workers - defined as anyone directly in contact with patients - had gotten at least one vaccine, a widely quoted survey by Kaiser Family Foundation and The Washington Post showed.

The vaccination rate surely has risen since then, but it's time for patience to end.

COVID-19 vaccination for health care workers should not be voluntary. Hospitals and nursing homes, in particular, should require workers to be vaccinated except in rare instances when employees can make a medical case for deferral. And health care systems, hospitals and nursing homes should be required to publicly report compliance rates.

A federal judge last week dismissed a lawsuit brought by 117 employees at Houston Methodist Hospital who opposed its COVID-19 vaccine requirement.

"This is not coercion. Methodist is trying to do their business of saving lives without giving them the COVID-19 virus. It is a choice made to keep staff, patients, and their families safer," U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes wrote. Health systems in Indiana, Maryland, Montana, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Washington D.C., are requiring employee COVID-19 vaccination.

Locally, hospitals typically require patients coming in for elective procedures to prove they are vaccinated or undergo a nasal swab for COVID-19 before arrival. It's not just not fair to protect health care workers from patients, but not the other way around; it's unsafe and contradicts the message - about themselves and about science - that health professionals have worked so hard for more than a year to send.

Imagine an unvaccinated health care worker examining an infant who's too young to get the shot or a transplant patient with a suppressed immune system for whom a vaccine might not be fully effective. Health care workers must wear masks, but masks alone weren't enough to put this pandemic on a downward spiral.

In the absence of required health care worker inoculation, it falls to the patient - perhaps while reclined on a stretcher, wearing a hospital gown and feeling ill - to ask whether others in the room are vaccinated against a virus that has killed 600,000 people in the U.S. Is anyone comfortable with that scenario?