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Gov. Tom Wolf hasn’t ruled out the possibility of following President Joe Biden’s lead and imposing a strict vaccine requirement on Commonwealth workers or subjecting them to mandatory testing and masking if they are not vaccinated.
“I haven’t made any decision on this,” he said when asked at a press conference on Friday.
Biden announced Thursday he was imposing the requirement on federal workers.
The president also called on states to start offering a monetary incentive to encourage the unvaccinated to get shot in the arms and pay for it out of the federal bailout money they received.
Wolf said Pennsylvania was one of the few states that hasn’t had to resort to incentives to attract people to get vaccinated. He attributed this to the Pennsylvanians who took care of their families and neighbors.
Wolf said he had no problem offering $ 100 incentives as Biden wishes, but said details of such a program have yet to be worked out.
The Wolf and Pennsylvania Coronavirus Task Force, which includes Democratic and Republican members of the House and Senate, is stepping up efforts to get more people vaccinated given the rapid spread of the highly contagious delta variant.
READ MORE: New COVID-19 infections once again exceed 1,000 in Pa.
In a letter to members of the General Assembly, they urged them to “use all the tools available to you, now” to promote COVID-19 vaccines on social media, in print materials and at events local.
“We are at a pivotal moment in this pandemic – a time that has already passed in states like Arkansas, Missouri and Louisiana – where we can either sit idly by as COVID evolves into a disease that is hospitalizing people. at rates rivaling the COVID we were experiencing in 2020, or we can redouble our vaccination efforts and work together to protect the progress we have made and avoid the consequences of widespread infection, ”the letter says (below ), published Friday.
Wolf, at the press conference, bragged about Pennsylvania’s success in vaccinating people. He said the state was at the top of the country for the percentage of Pennsylvanians aged 65 and over who received at least one dose of the vaccine.
“The strategy has always been vaccines and there is no doubt that the vaccine has worked,” he said.
New cases of COVID-19 have more than tripled in the past two weeks, to an average of around 725 per day, according to the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering. Hospitalizations have also started to rise again, increasing by more than a third in the past 10 days, state data shows.
New cases and hospitalizations are still only a fraction of what they were at the height of the pandemic last winter.
The pace of vaccinations, meanwhile, has slowed considerably to reach around 12,500 people per day. Almost 63% of adults in Pennsylvania are fully immunized, according to federal data.
Wolf and the task force’s letter warned that a resurgent virus could wreak havoc in nursing homes, threaten the state’s workforce and weigh on hospitals. He urged lawmakers to “talk about our common goals: to protect ourselves and those we love.” Please do so with care, understanding and urgency. “
The state health department is also planning a text messaging campaign to encourage more than 250,000 people who have skipped their second dose of the two-dose COVID-19 vaccine to track and get it.
House Republicans opposed the plan to send text messages, saying on Friday it raised serious privacy concerns and residents had not given permission to be contacted.
“Given this administration’s poor record of private health protection and the personally identifiable information of Pennsylvanians, questions remain about how this information is stored, who facilitates this text messaging program, and what assurances have been provided that this information is secure, ”said Jason Gottesman, spokesperson for House Republicans.
GOP lawmakers criticized the Wolf administration for a data breach involving the company Pennsylvania originally hired to conduct contact tracing in the state. Insight Global was fired in May after company employees compromised the private data of more than 70,000 residents.
Contact tracers identify people who have been exposed to the coronavirus so they can self-quarantine.
The Wolf administration said people receiving text messages gave their phone numbers to their health care providers when they made their first vaccine appointments, and the providers themselves also send text reminders.
“We must use all the tools at our disposal to encourage everyone from the age of 12 to get vaccinated,” Ministry of Health spokesperson Barry Ciccocioppo said. He accused House Republicans of “scare that spreads misinformation and puts people at risk.”
Michael Rubinkam of The Associated Press and Jan Murphy of PennLive contributed to this report.
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