In Montana, a judge ruled that a person’s choice to decline vaccinations does not outweigh public health and safety requirements in medical settings. The case involves Montana’s attorney general, who is part of an effort to reverse a federal mandate over Covid-19 vaccination in long-term care facilities.
“The public interest in protecting the general populace against vaccine-preventable diseases in health care settings using safe, effective vaccines is not outweighed by the hardships experienced to accomplish that interest,” U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy concluded in his Dec. 9 ruling.
The suit concerned a Montana law that supporters said would prevent employers from discriminating against employees who opt out of COVID-19 vaccinations. The ruling blocked that protection for health care workers, who will now be required to be “up-to-date” on their vaccinations.
Long-term care facilities had been exempted from that law, meaning that they still could require workers to be vaccinated against COVID-19. In the case before Molloy, plaintiffs pointed out that some people work in long-term care facilities as well as hospitals and clinics on the same day.
Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen will study Molloy’s opinion to “determine his next steps,” according to an Associated Press report.
Knudsen is leading a group of other state attorneys general in a challenge against the federal mandate for Covid-19 vaccination among long-term care facilities.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) defines being “up-to-date” as “having received a bivalent booster or having received a final shot of the original vaccines less than two months ago.”
The Montana ruling comes at a time when Officials with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) have said that the number of nursing home residents who are fully vaccinated is “far too low.”
“We need that to increase particularly as we go into these winter months when we are anticipating potential spikes of respiratory illness,” a CMS official said during last week’s Open Door Forum call with operators and industry stakeholders.
CMS officials continued that vaccination and timely treatment of COVID-19 will be a top priority of the Biden administration as the country heads into winter.
This week, a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis revealed that less than half (45%) of all nursing facility residents and less than a quarter of staff (22%) are up to date with their COVID-19 vaccinations – a sharp drop from the 87 percent of nursing facility residents and staff who completed their primary vaccination series.
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