President Biden Announces Sweeping COVID-19 Vaccine Plans

Yesterday, President Biden announced a six-part plan to address the continued issues of the COVID-19 pandemic. The plan will have a significant impact on millions of employees and tens of thousands of businesses across the country. The first part of the “plan” is to vaccinate the unvaccinated. To accomplish this goal, President Biden has implemented the following:

  • Requiring all employers with 100+ employees to ensure their workers are vaccinated or tested weekly. This provision will be issued and enforced by OSHA pursuant to an Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) which will require all employers with 100 or more employees to ensure their workforce is fully vaccinated or require any workers who remain unvaccinated to produce a negative test result on at least a weekly basis before coming to work.

    • This will also incorporate a regulation which would provide employees with paid leave to receive and recover from the vaccination.

  • Requiring vaccinations for all federal workers and for millions of contractors that do business with the federal government.

  • Requiring all federal executive branch workers to be vaccinated.

  • Directing that all federal contractors and their employees that do business with the federal government also be fully vaccinated.

  • Ordering the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to take action to require COVID vaccinations for health care workers at Medicare and Medicaid participating hospitals and other health care settings.

The OSHA and CMS regulations have yet to be issued, as such, we will need to wait a little longer to determine the full impact of step one of President Biden’s plan. Regardless, employers need to get prepared for what is coming down the road.

One of our founding partners, Ed Easterly, spoke about these issues with WFMZ last evening. The link to the article can be found here: Labor attorney weighs in on Biden's announcement on employer vaccine requirements | Lehigh Valley Regional News | wfmz.com

For questions about this or any other labor and employment law topic, please do not hesitate to contact the attorneys at Hoffman Hlavac & Easterly. To stay updated on key labor and employment developments that affect your workplace, subscribe to our blog and follow us on social media.


George Hlavac