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President BidenJoe BidenBiden administration readies lawsuit over Texas abortion law: Report Police expect Capitol fencing reinstalled for Sept. 18 rally Elder warns of ‘shenanigans’ in California recall election MORE will announce a new rule Thursday from the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to require all private employers with 100 or more employees to mandate vaccines or weekly testing.

A senior administration official said the rule will be issued “in the coming weeks,” and the implementation timeline will likely mirror the roughly 90 day window other private sector employers, like Tyson Foods and United Airlines, have required.

The requirement could impact nearly 80 millions workers, the administration official said, and if a business fails to comply with the rule they could face fines up to $14,000 per violation. 

The new rule for employers is one in a series of new aggressive steps that Biden will announce in a speech Thursday evening to boost vaccination rates in the coming weeks and rapidly scale up the country’s COVID-19 testing capacity, according to senior administration officials familiar with the plans. 

The new national strategy, dubbed “Path Out of the Pandemic,”  represents a redoubling of the administration’s efforts to combat the threat of the delta variant of the coronavirus. The administration has muddled through a summer marked by rising infections, and fierce resistance to public health measures from many Republican governors. 

Biden is also dramatically expanding vaccination requirements for health workers. Last month, the administration said it would require all staff at about 15,000 nursing homes to be vaccinated in order to receive Medicare and Medicaid funding, a move that would impact about 1.3 million employees. The rule is expected to be issued later this month.

Under the new plan, workers in most other health care settings that receive Medicare or Medicaid reimbursement, including major hospitals, will need to be vaccinated. The rules would impact 50,000 providers and about 17 million workers, but officials did not have an immediate effective date. 

The administration will also impose sweeping new vaccination requirements on federal employees and contractors. 

A senior administration official told reporters that under a new executive order to be announced by the president, federal employees will have 75 days to be fully vaccinated, with limited exemptions for religious or medical reasons. There will be no testing option. The order will cover about 100 million workers. 

“It’s simple; if you want to work for the federal government, you must be vaccinated. If you want to do business with the government, you must vaccinate your workforce,” the official said.

Vaccines will also be mandatory for all teachers and staff at Head Start and Early Head Start programs, as well as schools and youth programs operated by the Department of Defense and the Bureau of Indian Education.

The embrace of mandates represents a major escalation for the administration, which was previously reluctant to impose them. 

President Biden will also call on governors to get all teachers and school staff vaccinated, and will urge schools to set up regular COVID testing, consistent with CDC guidelines. 

Public health experts think regular screening of children and staff will be able to stop infections from spreading.

The federal government in the spring set aside $10 billion in funding for COVID screening tests for teachers, staff and students, but few took advantage as cases dropped.



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Post Source Thehill