President Biden Requires Vaccination of Federal Workers and Urges More $100 Vaccination Payments

     by Yehudit Garmaise

     President Biden is mandating federal workers to get vaccinated and also calling on state and local governments to use leftover funding from his $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan to give $100 to residents who get vaccinated.

     The president also said that federal workers will be asked to confirm their vaccination status, and that anyone who is not fully vaccinated will be required to mask at while at work, submit to COVID testing once or a twice a week, and stay physically distant from all other employees.

     When President Biden was criticized that he was putting the non-vaccinated “through a gauntlet,” the president responded that the number of unvaccinated Americans has “created the situation we are in now,” as the Delta variant fuels new infections nationwide, mostly among the unvaccinated.

     Mayor Bill de Blasio has similarly required New York City workers to get vaccinated and has also offered city residents $100 debit cards at state-run vaccination sites.

    President Biden, who also said, "We need to wear masks to protect each other and to stop the rapid spread of this virus as we work to get more people vaccinated," responded sharply to a reporter who challenged the president as why he is reversing his May declaration that people were vaccinated no longer had to wear masks.

     "That was true at the time," President Biden said. "I thought people were going to understand that getting vaccinated made a gigantic difference. What happened was the new variant came along, and they didn't get vaccinated, it spread more rapidly, and more people were getting sick.

     "That is the difference." 

     Showing frustration toward anti-vaxxers and those who believe the misinformation about the vaccine that spreads like wildfire on social media by only a small amount of posters, according to Mayor de Blasio, President Biden pointed out the COVID vaccines “were developed and administered under a Republican administration, and are now being administered under a Democratic administration, so the vaccine is not about red or blue states.”

     The White House cited research that showed that one-third of unvaccinated Americans said that cash payment would make them more likely to get their shots.

     “When you become infected with COVID now, you become ‘a human Petri dish,’ and an infected person can spread that virus to many people who don’t have symptoms, to people under 12,” said Dr. Jon LaPook, the chief medical correspondent of CBS News.

     President Biden also announced the next phase of his vaccination push, which includes an expansion of paid leave for Americans to get the vaccine and a new effort to vaccinate students ahead of the school year.

     “When the data changes, we give new advice based on the new data,” said Dr. LaPook, who agreed wholeheartedly with what the Biden administration was doing in terms of requiring and incentivizing vaccination for all Americans to prevent to endless replication, mutation, and spread of COVID-19.

     "People are dying and will die, who don't have to die," President Biden said. "If you're out there unvaccinated: You don't have to die."

 (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)