, including sweeping vaccine mandates that will affect 100 million American workers, nearly two-thirds of the country’s workforce.
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“As your president, I’m announcing tonight a new plan to get more Americans vaccinated to combat those blocking public health,” he said Sept. 9.
As part of a six-part plan unveiled in a speech from the State Dining Room of the White House, President Biden said he would require vaccinations for nearly 4 million federal workers and the employees of companies that contract with the federal government.
He has also directed the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to develop a rule that will require large employers -- those with at least 100 employees -- to ensure their workers are vaccinated or tested weekly.
Nearly 17 million health care workers will face new vaccine mandates as part of the conditions of participation in the Medicare and Medicaid programs.
President Biden said the federal government will require staff at federally funded Head Start programs and schools to be vaccinated. He’s also calling on all states to mandate vaccines for teachers.
“A distinct minority of Americans, supported by a distinct minority of elected officials, are keeping us from turning the corner,” PresidentBiden said. “These pandemic politics, as I refer to them, are making people sick, causing unvaccinated people to die.”
One public health official said he was glad to see the president’s bold action.
“What I saw today was the federal government trying to use its powers to create greater safety in the American population,” said Ashish K. Jha, MD, dean of the school of public health at Brown University, Providence, R.I., in a call with reporters after the speech.
National Nurses United, the largest union of registered nurses in the United States, issued a statement in support of President Biden’s new vaccination requirements, but pushed back on his language.
“…as advocates for public health, registered nurses want to be extremely clear: There is no such thing as a pandemic of only the unvaccinated. The science of epidemiology tells us there is just one deadly, global pandemic that has not yet ended, and we are all in it together. To get out of it, we must act together. All of us,” the statement says.
A host of other professional groups, including the American Medical Association and the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, also issued statements of support for President Biden’s plan.
But the plan was not well received by all.
“I will pursue every legal option available to the state of Georgia to stop this blatantly unlawful overreach by the Biden Administration,” said Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, a Republican, in a Tweet.
The National Council for Occupational Safety and Health called the plan “a missed opportunity” because it failed to include workplace protections for essential workers such as grocery, postal, and transit workers.
“Social distancing, improved ventilation, shift rotation, and protective equipment to reduce exposure are important components of an overall plan to reduce risk and stop the virus. These tools are missing from the new steps President Biden announced today,” said Jessica Martinez, co-executive director of the group.
In addition to the new vaccination requirements, President Biden said extra doses would be on the way for people who have already been fully vaccinated in order to protect against waning immunity, starting on Sept. 20. But he noted that those plans would be contingent on the Food and Drug Administration’s approval for third doses and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendation of the shots.
President Biden pledged to use the Defense Production Act to ramp up production of at-home tests, which have been selling out across the nation as the Delta variant spreads.
He also announced plans to expand access to COVID-19 testing, including offering testing for free at thousands of pharmacies nationwide and getting major retailers to sell at-home COVID-19 tests at cost.
The BinaxNow test kit, which currently retails for $23.99, will now cost about $15 for two tests at Kroger, Amazon, and Walmart, according to the White House. Food banks and community health centers will get free tests, too.
He called on states to set up COVID-19 testing programs at all schools.
Jha said that in his view, the big, game-changing news out of the president’s speech was the expansion of testing.
“Our country has failed to deploy tests in a way that can really bring this pandemic under control,” Jha said. “There are plenty of reasons, data, experience to indicate that if these were widely available, it would make a dramatic difference in reducing infection numbers across our country.”.
Dr. Jha said the private market had not worked effectively to make testing more widely available, so it was “absolutely a requirement of the federal government to step in and make testing more widely available,” he said.
President Biden also announced new economic stimulus programs, saying he’s expanding loan programs to small businesses and streamlining the loan forgiveness process.
President Biden said he’s boosting help for overburdened hospitals, doubling the number of federal surge response teams sent to hard-hit areas to reduce the strain on local health care workers. He said he would increase the pace of antibody treatments to states by 50%.
“We made so much progress during the past 7 months of this pandemic. Even so, we remain at a critical moment, a critical time,” he said. “We have the tools. Now, we just have to finish the job with truth, with science, with confidence and together as one nation.”
A version of this article first appeared on WebMD.com.