The Biden administration will require that nursing home staff be vaccinated against COVID-19 as a condition for those facilities to continue receiving federal Medicare and Medicaid funding.
The news was first reported by CNN.
Biden will announce the move Wednesday afternoon in a White House address as the administration continues to look for ways to use mandates to encourage vaccine holdouts to get shots, a senior administration official told The Associated Press.
The new mandate, in the form of a forthcoming regulation to be issued by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, could take effect as soon as next month.
Earlier Wednesday, federal health officials announced plans to offer Americans COVID-19 booster shots beginning the week of Sept. 20, eight months after their second dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines.
“Having reviewed the most current data, it is now our clinical judgment that the time to lay out a plan for COVID-19 boosters is now,” said Surgeon General Vivek Murthy in a briefing Wednesday.
“Recent data makes it clear that protection against mild and moderate disease has decreased over time. This is likely due to both the waning immunity and the strength of the widespread delta variant,” Dr. Murthy added.
The boosters are expected for Americans 18 and older, officials said, and they will first go to people vaccinated earliest in the process, such as in December or January.
Top health officials stressed on Wednesday that the vaccines are still protective for Americans who got the shot earlier this year, and they remain effective to fight the most severe effects of the delta variant.
“One thing is very clear: getting vaccinated can keep you out of the hospital. Getting vaccinated can save your life,” said Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky.
But Walensky also noted worrisome data about the shots’ strength among vulnerable populations, noting a CDC study that showed their effectiveness dropped from 75% to 53% in nursing homes over the summer, as the delta variant spread.
Hundreds of thousands of nursing home workers are not vaccinated, according to federal data, despite those facilities bearing the brunt of the early COVID-19 outbreak and their workers being among the first in the country to be eligible for shots.
It comes as the Biden administration seeks to raise the costs for those who have yet to get vaccinated, after months of incentives and giveaways proved to be insufficient to drive tens of millions of Americans to roll up their sleeves.
In just the past three weeks, Biden has forced millions of federal workers to attest to their vaccination status or face onerous new requirements, with even stricter requirements for federal workers in frontline health roles, and his administration has moved toward mandating vaccines for the military as soon as next month.
Biden has also celebrated businesses that have mandated vaccines for their own workforces and encouraged others to follow, and highlighted local vaccine mandates as a condition for daily activities, like indoor dining.
The new effort seems to be paying off, as the nation’s rate of new vaccinations has nearly doubled over the past month. More than 200 million Americans have now received at least one dose of the vaccines, according to the White House, but about 80 million Americans are eligible but haven’t yet been vaccinated.
Last year CMS used similar regulatory authority to prohibit most visitors from nursing homes in an effort to protect residents.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
