President Biden on Monday told companies to impose mandates on their employees and pleaded with holdouts to schedule their first shots after the Food and Drug Administration reviewed “mountains” of data from Pfizer and BioNTech and fully approved a COVID-19 vaccine for the first time.
Mr. Biden spoke directly to those who said they were waiting for regulators to license at least one of three vaccines that have been administered under an emergency use authorization.
Roughly 3 in 10 unvaccinated people told the Kaiser Family Foundation that they would be more likely to get vaccines if they were fully approved.
“It has now happened. The moment you’ve been waiting for is here. It’s time for you to get your vaccination. Get it today,” Mr. Biden said from the White House, hours after the FDA said it fully approved the Pfizer shots for ages 16 and older. “Those who’ve been waiting for full approval should go get your shot now.”
Mr. Biden is pleading with Americans to lift the country’s 51% vaccination rate as the delta variant rapidly spreads, filing hospitals along the Gulf Coast and denting his recovery plans as he deals with the chaos in Afghanistan.
The president said hospitalization and death rates are climbing again from the delta variant but remain far below the January peak in part because more than 7 in 10 adults and 9 in 10 seniors have received at least one shot. He touted rising interest in the shots in hard-hit places such as Louisiana and Alabama.
“This is critical progress. But we need to move faster,” Mr. Biden said.
The president explicitly called on employers to require vaccinations and cited his own mandate for federal employees.
Some workplaces announced rules in conjunction with the FDA’s decision.
CoxHealth, a hospital system in Missouri, said workers must get their first doses by Oct. 15.
“Careful consideration will be given to allow medical and religious exemptions. To assure the patient safety, anyone with an exemption will be required to test,” President and CEO Steven Edwards tweeted.
New York City said Monday that all public education employees, including teachers and custodians, must receive at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine by Sept. 27. The decision follows similar mandates in Washington state, Chicago and Los Angeles.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, said Monday that all public employees in the state, including school workers, must get vaccinated or face weekly testing. It was a massive expansion of a mandate that applied to health care workers and long-term care settings.
The FDA said its decision to license the Pfizer vaccine was based on data that the drugmaker provided from more than 40,000 trial participants in the U.S., Europe, Turkey, South Africa and South America.
Regulators said the vaccine was 91% effective against COVID-19 in these participants, a slight drop from the 95% observed ahead of the emergency approval late last year.
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.
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