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Biden Admin Gives Nursing Homes More Leeway On COVID Vax Mandate Compliance [Epoch]...

Biden Admin Gives Nursing Homes More Leeway on COVID Vaccine Mandate Compliance

COVID NEWS
Bill Pan
Oct 29 2022


Doses of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine and vaccination record cards for children under 5 at UW Medical Center - Roosevelt in Seattle, Wash., on June 21, 2022. (David Ryder/Getty Images)

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The Biden administration has softened its language in an updated guidance on COVID-19 vaccination enforcement, telling surveyors to not cite nursing homes so long as “good faith efforts” are being made to vaccinate all their staff.
In a memo (pdf) released Wednesday, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) says it still expects all long-term care and skilled nursing facilities to make sure their staff are vaccinated, unless otherwise exempted by law. A facility with “unexcepted staff” vaccination rates below 100 percent is considered noncompliant, and as a result, can risk being stripped of federal Medicare and Medicaid funds.

That being said, the federal agency also states that noncompliance with the vaccine mandate doesn’t always require enforcement. Specifically, surveyors are instructed to consider whether nursing homes are showing a “good faith effort” to achieve compliance before taking enforcement actions against them.
Some examples of actions showing a “good faith effort” include if a facility has no or limited access to the vaccine and has documented attempts to get the vaccine, or if the facility provides evidence that they have taken “aggressive steps” to have all staff vaccinated.
“If the POC [plan of correction] demonstrates that the facility staff vaccination rate is 90 percent or more, and all policies and procedures were developed and implemented, this would be considered a good faith effort and the deficiency could be cleared, with the facility returned to substantial compliance,” the agency wrote.
The changes, according to the CMS, have to do with “relatively low” levels of COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths across the nation.
“This is a testament to the tools and protections in place today, particularly the work that federal, state, local, and private partners have done to get over 226 million people vaccinated and over 111 million boosted,” the agency said in the memo.
Federal Mandate Survives Court Challenges

Earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge seeking to appeal its January ruling, which narrowly upheld the CMS mandate for Americans working at medical facilities that receive federal funding.
Ten states sued President Joe Biden when the CMS announced the mandate in November 2021, and a federal judge in Missouri issued a temporary order to block it. The lawsuit was led by Missouri, which was joined by Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming.
In a divided 5–4 decision (pdf), the high court affirmed that the CMS had the authority to impose vaccine mandates on health care facilities as a condition of their Medicaid and Medicare participation, recognizing that the agency has long been requiring federal fund recipients to follow certain rules, including those about “infection prevention and control.”
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined their three liberal colleagues to form a narrow majority. “After all, ensuring that providers take steps to avoid transmitting a dangerous virus to their patients is consistent with the fundamental principle of the medical profession: first, do no harm,” they wrote.
Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito offered two dissenting opinions. While Alito raised the issue of why an agency such as CMS can “regulate first and listen later,” Thomas argued that the CMS simply doesn’t have such rule-making power to essentially force millions of health care workers to undergo a medical procedure they do not want.
“If Congress had wanted to grant CMS authority to impose a nationwide vaccine mandate, and consequently alter the state-federal balance, it would have said so clearly,” wrote Thomas. “It did not.”



Biden Admin Gives Nursing Homes More Leeway on COVID Vaccine Mandate Compliance (theepochtimes.com)