lane, and the off lane is if you get tested frequently enough and find out you re positive you won t come to work and you won t infect other people. so it really is somewhat of a compromise there. myself, i would make it just vaccinate or not, but he was trying to be moderate in what his pronouncement was. so dr. fauci there saying he would not let workers opt out of vaccine requirements with testing. was this biden policy made based on public health or political considerations or both? a little bit of both. i agree with dr. fauci. tonight the president removed the testing option from the federal government requiring all federal workers to get vaccinated, without a test out option. and i think he should have made the same requirement for companies with more than 100 people. i don t think the president went far enough. i was hoping that he would ban travel by unvaccinated people beginning in november.
of the largest tenants of this plan, but it would also mandate vaccines for all federal workers, contractors with no testing option, mandate vaccines for educators in federally funded programs, for workers at facilities that accept medicare, medicaid funding and call on entertainment venues to require proof of vaccination or testing. officials behind the scenes tell cnn that they recognize that large employers could really mount challenges in court because of these new actions. but they hope that this provides businesses with kind of a federal cover to than date vaccines for their employees as the white house is starting to restart and rejump basically their attack plan on covid trying to get this under control so that they can focus on other thing. but remember, this is something that president biden over month and months has staked his claim on saying that he could control.
must mandate vaccinations or weekly testing. in addition, all federal workers or companies with federal contracts must have their employees vaccinated with no testing option. that includes 17 million health care workers at medicare and medicaid participating facilities. any minute now, the president and first lady will continue that push at a local school in d.c. speaking of schools, overnight, los angeles county, the second largest school district in the nation made it mandatory for students 12 and older, anybody eligible, to be vaccinated to attend in person. joining me, nbc news white house correspondent monica alba. so first, the push from the president, now the push back from several republican governors, the republican national committee announcing it will sue to stop what it calls unconstitutional mandate. i am sure this is no surprise to the white house. what s the strategy moving forward, and how quickly could
collectively get us out of this pandemic. but as this did not happen, as the delta variant spread, we are seeing these steps from the president. so, again, one of the most significant steps is on these private businesses of 100 or more employees requiring them to have their employees be either vaccinated or submit to regular coronavirus testing. then, of course, there is this mandate for all federal workers and employees of federal contractors to be vaccinated with no longer having that testing option that had been in place for the last couple of months. also vaccine mandate for educators and federally funded programs like the head start program, for example, and you can see some of the other steps here as well. so, a very significant list here. more action than we have seen from the president before in terms of requiring vaccination for the population. and one of the reasons why is we saw that on in the president s words yesterday. that rising frustration that he and so many america
responsibility, through osha, to protect workers. to make sure they re not in grave danger or in simple terms, they re not at risk. they are with unvaccinated workers in the workplace. this is part of the responsible, p the responsibility, the legal authority to put in place that workers are vaccinated or tested at least once per week. that applies to all employers greater than 100 employees. i understand. why put the weekly testing option in? i know you didn t for the federal government. if you go to health care, which i mentioned we started with veteran affairs hospitals, today the president used the power of the payer of medicare and medicaid to 50,000 health care facilities, and for those 17 million workers, they are now required to be vaccinated. i think requirements for vaccination certainly make sense in the federal government, in