Workers at Santa Clara County health care and long-term care facilities, homeless shelters and prisons will no longer be required to get vaccinated against COVID-19.
Santa Clara County Health Officer and Public Health Director Dr. Sara Cody on Monday rescinded the vaccination mandate for workers in these settings. Under state public health rules, masks are still required in high-risk settings.
Vaccination or frequent testing had been a requirement for workers in settings with a high-risk of viral transmission since last summer, when most counties in the Bay Area responded to the rise of highly contagious variants by mandating vaccination and, once they became available, booster vaccine doses.
Cody said Monday that the county's high vaccination rate and easy access to COVID testing made the existing mandate unnecessary.
“COVID-19 remains a serious threat to our community, and I urge everyone to continue to protect each other and the most vulnerable among us by masking and staying up to date on their vaccinations with the latest bivalent booster,” she said in a statement.
Cody also rescinded health orders requiring large health care providers like Kaiser Permanente and Sutter Health Palo Alto Medical Foundation to provide requisite COVID testing and requiring all health care workers to get a flu vaccine and wear a mask indoors.
As of Sept. 12, 87.1% of county residents had completed their initial vaccination series. In addition, 69% of residents ages 5 and up have received at least one booster vaccine dose, according to health officials.
“Cody said Monday that the county’s high vaccination rate and easy access to COVID testing made the existing mandate unnecessary.”
This has been true for well over a year, ever since vaccines became available to the masses. There was never a need for a mandate – as vaccines don’t prevent transmission, and this County did NOT follow the science for a long time. They need to keep mandates away from kids. I am shocked Cody has not been fired for not only harming kids, but destroying the local economy with arbitrary, harmful and fear-based mandates.
Did anyone lose their job because of the mandate, and if so, will they be rehired and compensated?
Many people lost their jobs for not being vaccinated. Millions of vaccinated people, including me, are now subject to an unknown health future. Thanks Cody. Recent studies have shown that masks are of dubious value and quite possibly detrimental to health for the general population. Studies have also shown that the vaccinated can shed the covid virus for a longer period of time than the unvaccinated. It’s difficult for health officials to get more things wrong than they did with the covid fiasco. A clue that they didn’t know what they were talking about should have been when our chief covid doctor suggested that the general public improve the function of a certified medical mask by applying another covering over it…or was that under it?
It was never necessary. Cody and her ilk had no idea what they were doing.
Above her level (think Fauci), there were lots of scientists that got royalty payments from the vaccines. They didn’t want therapeutics, they wanted a vaccine. They couldn’t make any money off the therapeutics. Just finished a book by Robert Kennedy, Jr. “The Real Anthony Fauci” that was astounding.
The book must be true because nobody at the Fauci, Bill Gates level has sued Kennedy; and, Kennedy had called them virtually everything you could think up to call a low-life money-grubbing scumbag, including that they are responsible for murdering people.
Cody needs to take some antacid tablets and retire! She is truly an embarrassment.