Governor Cuomo issued a letter to U.S. Department of Homeland Security Acting Secretary Chad Wolf asking him to require that airline travelers to the United States receive a negative COVID-19 test result before being allowed into the country.
All eyes will be on the U.S. Capitol Wednesday during the joint session to confirm President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory. Republican allies
More than half of vaccine doses delivered to states in Philadelphia region have not been used phillytrib.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from phillytrib.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
COVID-19 vaccine: Can businesses and employers mandate it?
Brian Bouchard, Esq.
Now that we have two approved vaccines, many businesses are asking whether they can require customers and employees to vaccinate. Can a company offering harbor cruises out of Portsmouth, for example, require all patrons to show proof of vaccination or otherwise be denied service? Can companies across the New Hampshire Seacoast require their workforces to vaccinate before returning to an in-office setting? Putting aside vaccine scarcity for a moment, the question of whether businesses can mandate vaccination is muddled and contains many traps for the unwary.
Let’s start with how the vaccine received approval. So far there are only two companies with approved vaccines: Pfizer and Moderna. Each company received what’s called an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) from the Food and Drug Administration. Fair warning, this article contains a good deal of abbreviations. An EUA is not the same as
1. “An Evolving Situation”
There are three moments in the yearlong catastrophe of the
COVID-19 pandemic when events might have turned out differently. The first occurred on January 3, 2020, when Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, spoke with George Fu Gao, the head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which was modelled on the American institution. Redfield had just received a report about an unexplained respiratory virus emerging in the city of Wuhan.
The field of public health had long been haunted by the prospect of a widespread respiratory-illness outbreak like the 1918 influenza pandemic, so Redfield was concerned. Gao, when pressed, assured him that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission. At the time, the theory was that each case had arisen from animals in a “wet” market where exotic game was sold. When Redfield learned that, among twenty-seven reported cases, there were several famil