As the Occupational Health and Safety Administration prepares to release its emergency temporary standard mandating COVID-19 vaccination for employers with 100 or more workers, some governors are resisting workplace mandates — to their apparent detriment.
Recent survey results from the COVID States Project suggest that governors of states without vaccine mandates or where vaccine mandates are forbidden have “significantly lower” approval for the way they are handling the pandemic.
“Our findings really suggest that individuals in our survey were rewarding these governors who took proactive steps to combat the pandemic and they were punishing governors who prohibited public health policies that would combat the pandemic like vaccine mandates,” Alauna C. Safarpour, Ph.D., a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy and one of the project’s researchers, told Politico.
Governors in states with vaccine mandates are averaging a 52% approval rating on their management of the pandemic. In states where there are no vaccine mandates, that figure dropped to 42%, and in places where mandates are banned, only 36% of people approved of their governors’ handling of COVID-19, according to the survey results.
It remains to be seen how opposition to vaccine mandates by some state leaders pans out once the federal mandate kicks in. Long-term care providers might find themselves in limbo as some states try to keep the federal government from regulating private businesses. Many business groups, on the other hand, have expressed displeasure with vaccine mandate prohibitions, wishing to make their own decisions regarding vaccine requirements for their employees.In a move that White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said last week is “putting politics ahead of public health,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) seemingly taunted the Biden administration by prohibiting “any entity in Texas” from mandating COVID-19 vaccinations for an employee or consumer “who objects to such vaccination for any reason of personal conscience, based on a religious belief, or for medical reasons, including prior recovery from COVID-19.”
