The White House has posted numbers showing the percentage of employees at major agencies who are vaccinated or in compliance with Covid-19 vaccination requirements. At Social Security, 87.7% of agency employees have had at least one vaccination and 95.0% are in compliance with federal requirements. For those not in compliance, here's what's ahead according to the White House:
... For those employees who are not yet in compliance, agencies are beginning a period of education and counseling, followed by additional enforcement steps, consistent with guidance from the Safer Federal Workforce Task Force and the Office of Personnel Management. At any point, if an employee gets their first shot or submits an exception request, agencies will pause further enforcement to give the employee a reasonable amount of time to become fully vaccinated or to process the exception request. ...
No back-patting is merited. "95% compliance" sounds good, but compliance includes people with requests for medical exemptions (which should be rare) or religious exemptions (which are frankly dubious). SSA's actual vaccination rate is a little under 88%. Along with several other large, public-facing departments like Interior, Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, and Agriculture, that's among the lowest in government.
ReplyDeleteThat's not acceptable. Closing the field offices was the right thing to do in March 2020. But it's long past time to reopen them, with fully-vaccinated employees.
Well hopefully those who don't comply will get fired because I don't want to work in a poorly ventilated office with unvaccinated co-workers.
ReplyDelete@4:25 ....and the claimants shouldn't be exposed to unvaccinated employees, one...they may be able to transmit it to the unvaccinated, and two... well, they just shouldn't be exposed to a potentially deadly virus while visiting a social security office.
ReplyDeleteHopefully they can keep unvaccinated members of the public out as well.
ReplyDeleteThat doesnt seem like a wave of retirements to me.
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ReplyDeleteThe new Omicron variant may get around the vaccinations. New York has just declared a state of emergency.
This is most certainly not the time for SSA to announce reopening in a month. Last summer would have been a much better and safer time for SSA to reopen, than January 2022.
No proof that Omnicon is more threatening than any other variant at this point.
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