The gigantic University of Pittsburgh Medical Center — one of the top health care systems in the U.S. — will NOT require its 89,000 employees to get the Covid-19 vaccine.
This despite requiring all of them to get the flu vaccine every year.
The reason? PennLive explains:
The main reason is general uncertainty about the COVID-19 vaccine — the first of several vaccines in the pipeline could receive emergency approval from the U.S. government this month, possibly within days. UPMC is preparing to begin offering COVID-19 vaccine to front-line health care workers as soon as this month.
Dr. Graham Snyder, UPMC’s medical director of infection prevention and hospital epidemiology, said UPMC’s mandatory flu vaccination policy “is based on decades of experience with the influenza vaccine.”
But there’s no comparable data for a COVID-19 vaccine, or on whether a mandate is the best way to get large numbers of people to become vaccinated, Snyder said on Tuesday.