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Justice seeks vaccine waiver for rural hospitals

Gov. Jim Justice speaks during Monday’s online COVID-19 briefing, when he announced he would appeal to federal authorities for a waiver for rural hospitals to the mandate for healthcare workers to be vaccinated. (Photo Provided)

CHARLESTON — As he continued to urge people to protect themselves from COVID-19 with vaccines and boosters, Gov. Jim Justice on Monday said he’ll join two other states’ chief executives in requesting a waiver for rural hospitals from the federal vaccine mandate for healthcare workers.

“Maybe we can live with that in our more populated areas,” Justice said during Monday’s online COVID briefing. “But living with that in rural West Virginia, you know, where we truly do have some folks that are going to have to be terminated and everything because they just choose not to be vaccinated … what is that really going to do? It’s going to make it tougher and tougher and tougher for us to provide care in our rural hospitals.”

Although the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s vaccine-or-test requirement for businesses with at least 100 employees, it let stand a mandate for workers at healthcare facilities receiving Medicare or Medicaid funding. But Justice said that could reduce the already stretched-thin staffing levels at hospitals in rural parts of the state.

“We’re overloaded, and we can’t afford to be losing anybody,” he said.

The West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources reported 1,070 people hospitalized with COVID, just 10 shy of the all-time high less than a week ago. Of those, 739 (69.1 percent) are unvaccinated.

Justice said he will join fellow Republican Govs. Bill Lee of Tennessee and Glenn Youngkin of Virginia in requesting a waiver from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the Biden administration.

“It is not saving lives. It is not helping people. In this situation, it is hurting us and hurting us in a bad way,” he said. “Providing care in a rural area’s tough enough, but if we have to lose additional staffing and everything, it makes it dadgum near impossible.”

The governor, who credits being vaccinated and boosted for helping him through his own bout of COVID, said he would encourage healthcare workers and others who have not been vaccinated to get the shot but that their beliefs must be respected.

Dr. Clay Marsh, the state’s coronavirus czar and vice president/executive dean for Health Sciences at West Virginia University, said staffing is a problem at all hospitals as some workers have decided to change careers in the face of the challenges of the pandemic while others are dealing with their own illnesses and exposures to the virus.

Rural hospitals are more vulnerable to staffing issues than their larger, urban counterparts, and Justice is trying to weigh the risk-benefit ratio of keeping them open and getting people vaccinated, he said.

“I will certainly bow to the governor’s wisdom as the leader of the state to try to balance that,” Marsh said. “And as the governor articulated, the three governors asked for a waiver as opposed to edicting anything.”

Dr. Ayne Amjad, state health officer, said rural areas face challenges that larger cities do not.

“I think these are just decisions that we’re going to have to face and make and go with them because we have to make them for patients in these types of populations,” she said.

Justice said the state has received no “substantive” answer from the Biden administration on its request to administer a second COVID booster to eligible individuals.

“We’re still looking for a response that’s not just lip service,” he said.

Marsh said data from Israel indicates a fourth COVID shot reduces hospitalization risk by three times and new infections by two times.

Evan Bevins can be reached at ebevins@newsandsentinel.com.

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