President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for most U.S. workers suffered a fatal blow last month, when a Supreme Court majority ruled that Congress did not authorize the administration to force workers to get the jab.
Yet the court also ruled that the provision could stand for healthcare workers who toil for agencies and facilities that receive federal funding for Medicare and Medicaid.
Now, according to the health news website MedPage Today, the Biden administration faces a new problem in trying to force shots into the arms of this subset of workers.
“A federal database that tracks hospital COVID vaccinations for personnel in each healthcare system is extremely erroneous,” MedPage reported last month, citing responses by five of the largest hospital systems in the country, including AdventHealth in Central Florida and Orlando Regional Medical Center.
As one example, the feds claimed that AdventHealth Orlando has 44,000 employees and that a little more than half were fully vaccinated. A spokesman for the hospital countered that 96 percent of the staff is vaccinated, and added, “We don’t have 44,000 employees in one hospital.”
The hospital system of the University of Illinois faced a similar situation.
The feds’ database asserted that the university’s hospital in Chicago had more than 23,000 workers and that roughly half were unvaxxed.
In reality, the unvaxxed number for the hospital was actually roughly twice the total number of its employees.
In one more instance, the Biden administration claimed that Mount Sinai Hospital in New York had the third-highest number of employees in the country. Hospital officials told MedPage that more than 99 percent of their employees were jabbed.
Orlando Regional Medical Center also made the list, in the fifth spot among the most unvaccinated. The hospital told MedPage that it has half the total number of workers as the federal database claims.
MedPage noted that it’s unclear “whether this dataset will be used to enforce healthcare worker vaccination mandates,” although it is critical in determining compliance with the mandate the Supreme Court allowed to stand.
MedPage also reported that it “called and emailed multiple times to reach several HHS [Department of Health and Human Services] officials with requests for an explanation,” but they did not reply, at least by publication time.
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