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In August, Governor John Bel Edwards told state officials that once a vaccine for the coronavirus was fully approved, they would likely have a choice: either get vaccinated or undergo regular testing.
“We need to have safe workplaces,” Edwards said, suggesting testing requirements for unvaccinated workers to make sure they don’t spread the deadly disease.
But more than a month later, no such testing regimen has been implemented, even after the United States Food & Drug Administration approved the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on August 23.
In the end, the effort turned out to be too difficult, Edwards said.
“We continue to advocate for vaccinating people because it is the right thing to do,” the governor said at a press conference last week. “But putting in place the testing program that would be necessary is really difficult.”
Hurricane Ida is partly responsible.
The catastrophic storm made landfall shortly after the FDA granted full vaccine approval, and officials had little time to focus on the logistical hurdles of setting up a program. test for government officials.
A nationwide shortage of rapid COVID tests is also to blame, the governor said. Although the Louisiana Department of Health has approximately 150,000 rapid tests in stock, a large portion of these are used to support testing in K-12 schools and areas affected by Ida.
However, that may soon change. The White House recently announced that it is investing $ 2 billion to ramp up production of some rapid home tests, which federal officials say will quadruple their availability by the end of the year.
But even if the supplies were sufficient, it’s unclear how Louisiana would coordinate making these tests available to all of its workers. The state employs more than 40,000 people in the offices of the 64 parishes. The health ministry said it was not possible to set up testing sites in every state office.
“Implementing this type of vaccination and testing policy for our executive employees is difficult because there are many moving parts and we have many executive employees,” the door wrote on Thursday. -speaking of Governor Christina Stephens in a statement.
It is not known how many state workers are unvaccinated, but Edwards hoped to use this policy to push workers to roll up their sleeves.
“We think we can say, ‘You are a government employee. You are not vaccinated. You have to go for a test. And if you don’t, you’re going to be fired. We can do it, ”administration commissioner Jay Dardenne said in August.
Some states require employees to receive the vaccine and do not offer an alternative testing for the unvaccinated, an option Edwards does not plan to implement in Louisiana at this time, Stephens said.
“Going forward, we will continue to assess our stock of tests and other options for testing government officials who are not yet vaccinated,” Stephens said.
But several questions remain, including how often the tests would be needed, when they would be offered and how the state would pay for them.
State law prohibits a public employer from requiring an employee to pay for a medical or drug test as a condition of employment, so taxpayers will have to foot the bill.
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