Nursing Home COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates Protect The Most Vulnerable, But Pose a Hidden Threat to Residents

By Tara Law, Time Magazine, September 2, 2021 Some two weeks before U.S. President Joe Biden announced on Aug. 18 that nursing homes must require their staff to get vaccinated or risk losing their Medicare and Medicaid funding, Genesis HealthCare, which manages about 250 facilities nationwide that offer long-term care and other services, had said its workers would need to be vaccinated.

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Most nursing homes won’t use pharmacy chains to administer coronavirus booster shots

By Lena H. Sun, The Washington Post, August 27 2021 Judie Shape, center, at the Life Care Center in Kirkland, Wash., visited last year through the window of her room with her daughter Lori Spencer, left, and son-in-law Michael Spencer. (Ted S. Warren/AP) The Biden administration does not plan to rely on national pharmacy chains to give booster doses of coronavirus vaccines to millions of nursing home residents this fall, as officials did last winter, federal health officials said.

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Nursing Homes Confront New Covid Outbreaks Amid Calls for Staff Vaccination Mandates

By Matt Richtel and Reed Abelson, New York Times, August 10 2021 Tina Sandri, the C.E.O. of Forest Hills Nursing Home in Washington, D.C., receiving the vaccine in February. About 60 percent of U.S. nursing home staff are vaccinated. Kenny Holston for The New York Times In late spring, the 142 nursing homes operated by the Good Samaritan Society hit a milestone that was unthinkable just four months earlier: Zero cases of Covid-19 across the whole company, from 900 at the peak of the pandemic.

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Getting to Yes: A Nursing Home’s Mission to Vaccinate Its Hesitant Staff

By Abby Goodnough, photographs by Kenny Holston, New York Times, March 29 2021 Deborah Childs, a staff member of the Forest Hills nursing home in Washington, D.C., receiving a Covid-19 vaccine last month. She was hesitant at first, she said, but later, “I took the opportunity to just read everything I could.” WASHINGTON — The Covid-19 vaccine had finally come to Forest Hills of D.C., a nursing home in a prosperous neighborhood of the nation’s capital, but there was a problem.

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Lawmakers: Require nursing homes to disclose vaccine data

By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, AP News, March 25 2021 FILE – In this Jan. 15, 2021, file photo, CVS Pharmacists prepare the COVID-19 vaccine for the nursing home residents at Harlem Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation, a nursing home facility in Harlem neighborhood of New York. Nursing homes have to publicly disclose their vaccination rates for flu and pneumonia, but there’s no similar mandate for COVID-19 shots.

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Advocates for the elderly call on Biden administration to do more to vaccinate seniors against Covid-19

By Jen Christensen, CNN, March 24 2021 In early April, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention program that delivered Covid-19 vaccines to long-term care facilities should be complete. With cases dropping faster than among the general public, the CDC calls the program a real success, but advocates are concerned about what happens when it ends. As of Tuesday, more than 43% ofAmericans 65 and older are fully vaccinated against Covid-19, according to the CDC.

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Mobile teams help vaccines reach vulnerable seniors

By Rachel Bluth, Kaiser Health News, March 9 2021 Lenora Brown, 65, prepares for her first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. “I want to live to be over 100. Don’t give me anything that will mess me up!” she joked with the nurse. ANTIOCH, Calif. >> A mobile “strike team” is bringing vaccines to some of Northern California’s most vulnerable residents along with a message: This is how you avoid dying from COVID-19.

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CDC guidelines for fully vaccinated could set stage for easing of some local rules

By David Rosenfeld and Alicia Robinson, The Daily Breeze, March 9 2021 Resident Wendy Green, center, is served by Marisol Barrera at the dining room at Emerald Court in Anaheim, CA on Monday, March 8, 2021. Dining with Green is resident Alice Tillman. Residents were able to come to the dining room for the first time since social distancing restrictions were put into place after the CDC revised their guidelines.

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Nursing Homes, Once Hotspots, Far Outpace U.S. in Covid Declines

By Matthew Conlen, Sarah Mervosh and Danielle Ivory, New York Times, February 25 2021 Throughout the pandemic, there has been perhaps nowhere more dangerous than a nursing home. The coronavirus has raced through some 31,000 long-term care facilities in the United States, killing more than 163,000 residents and employees and accounting for more than a third of all virus deaths since the late spring.

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