CLAIM: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that a new COVID-19 variant is more contagious among vaccinated people than those who are unvaccinated.

AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. In a risk assessment summary published Aug. 23, the CDC wrote that the BA.2.86 variant may be more likely to infect people with existing immunity to COVID-19, either from vaccinations or prior infections, than previous variants. It did not say that vaccinated people are at a higher risk than the unvaccinated.

THE FACTS: Social media users have in recent days misrepresented the public health agency’s guidance on BA.2.86, after the new variant emerged in mid-August.

“BREAKING: CDC says new COVID variant is more contagious among vaccinated people than those unvaccinated,” reads a post shared on Instagram and X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

As of Monday, one tweet that shared the post had received more than 15,000 likes and more than 7,500 shares.

But this is a distortion of the CDC’s current understanding of BA.2.86. The agency has not said that those who have been vaccinated against COVID-19 are more likely than unvaccinated people by the new variant. Rather, it said those who’ve been vaccinated or previously infected may be more susceptible than they were to prior variants.

“Based on what CDC knows now, the large number of mutations in this new variant raises concern that BA.2.86 may be more capable of causing infection in people who have previously had COVID-19 or who have received COVID-19 vaccines,” the agency said in a statement, bolding the word “or.”

Those making the false claim are misrepresenting the CDC’s Aug. 23 risk assessment for the variant, which said: “BA.2.86 may be more capable of causing infection in people who have previously had COVID-19 or who have received COVID-19 vaccines.” It elaborated near the end of the assessment that “the large number of mutations in this variant raises concerns of greater escape from existing immunity from vaccines and previous infections compared with other recent variants.”

In its statement, the agency said that it is still closely monitoring the variant but that it is “too soon to know the real-world impacts on immunity” and encouraged people to stay up-to-date on their COVID-19 vaccines.

As of Aug. 23, BA.2.86 had been reported in the U.S., U.K., Denmark, South Africa and Israel, according to the CDC.
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This is part of AP’s effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. Learn more about fact-checking at AP.

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NEW YORK (AP) — Employers are losing patience with unvaccinated workers.

For months, most employers relied on information campaigns, bonuses and other incentives to encourage their workforces to get the COVID-19 shot. Now, a growing number are imposing rules to make it more onerous for employees to refuse, from outright mandates to requiring the unvaccinated to undergo regular testing.

Among employers getting tougher are the federal government, the state governments of California and New York, tech giants Google and Facebook, the Walt Disney Co. and the NFL. Some hospitals, universities, restaurants, bars and other entertainment venues have also started requiring vaccines.

But the new measures are unlikely to affect many of the millions of unvaccinated Americans.

Many of the companies that are requiring shots have mostly office workers who are already largely vaccinated and are reluctant to work alongside those who aren’t.

In contrast, major companies that rely on low-income blue-collar workers — food manufacturers, warehouses, supermarkets and other store chains — are shying away from mandates for fear of driving away employees and worsening the labor shortages such businesses are facing.

Tyson Foods, for instance, said about half of its U.S. workforce — 56,000 employees — has received shots after the meat and poultry processor hosted more than 100 vaccination events since February. But the company said it has no plans to impose a mandate to reach the other half.

Walmart and Amazon, the country’s two largest private employers, have also declined to require its hourly workers to get vaccinated, continuing to rely on strategies such as bonuses and onsite access to shots. But in a potentially powerful signal, Walmart said employees at its headquarters will be required to get vaccinated by Oct. 4.

The biggest precedent so far has come from the federal government, the nation’s largest employer. President Joe Biden announced last week that all federal employees and contractors must get vaccinated or put up with weekly testing and lose privileges such as official travel.

The federal government has said it will cover the costs of the weekly tests. As for other employers, insurance may pay for such testing at some workplaces but not others.

Biden’s decision could embolden other employers by signaling they would be on solid legal ground to impose similar rules, said Brian Kropp, chief of research at consulting firm Gartner’s human resources practice.

But Kropp said some companies face complicated considerations that go beyond legalities, including deep resistance to vaccines in many states where they operate.

Retailers like Walmart might have a hard time justifying vaccine requirements for their workers while allowing shoppers to remain unvaccinated, Kropp added. Stores have mostly avoided vaccine requirements for customers for fear of alienating them and because of the difficulty in trying to verify their status.

In surveys by Gartner, fewer than 10% of employers have said they intend to require all employees to be vaccinated.

But a shift is building amid frustration over plateauing vaccination rates and alarm over the spread of the more contagious delta variant.

On Monday, the U.S. finally reached Biden’s goal of dispensing at least one shot to 70% of American adults — but a month late and amid a fierce surge that is driving hospital caseloads in some places to their highest levels since the outbreak began. The president had hoped to reach his target by the Fourth of July.

The Union Square Hospitality Group, a group of New York City restaurants and bars founded by Danny Meyer, is now requiring employees and customers to be vaccinated by Sept. 7.

The San Francisco Bar Owner Alliance, a group of about 300 bars, made a similar decision following a meeting where “the thing that stood out was anger and frustration” toward vaccine holdouts, said founder Ben Bleiman.

While some companies fear vaccine mandates will drive workers away, the pandemic itself is also causing absenteeism. Bleiman said he recently had to close his bar for a night after his bartender, who was fully vaccinated, tested positive and a replacement couldn’t be found.

Some employers are concluding that requiring vaccines is simpler than trying to come up with different rules on masks and social distancing for the small number of unvaccinated employees.

BlackRock, the global investment manager, is allowing only vaccinated workers into its U.S. offices for now and said people will be free to go maskless, as local health guidelines allow, and sit next to each other and congregate without restrictions. The firm said 85% of its U.S. employees are vaccinated or in the process of getting shots.

Matthew Putman, CEO of New York-based high-tech manufacturing hub Nanotronics, said he agonized over his decision to impose a vaccine mandate on his more than 100 employees. As it turned out, nearly all of them were already vaccinated, though he dreads the prospect of having to fire any holdouts.

“I hate the thought. But if it has to happen it has to happen,” Putman said. “I lost a ton of sleep over this but not as much sleep as I’ve lost over the fear of infection.”

Other mandates could provide a clearer test of the potential for employee backlash.

Hospitals and nursing home chains, for instance, are increasingly requiring the vaccine. So far, such mandates have survived legal challenges. More than 150 employees at a Houston hospital system who refused to get the COVID-19 shot were fired or resigned after a judge dismissed an employee lawsuit over the requirement.

Atria Senior Living, which operates more than 200 senior living communities across the country, was among the first to mandate vaccines for its staff in January.

It worked. Nearly 99% of Atria’s 10,000 employees are vaccinated, and only a tiny fraction quit over the requirement, said CEO and Chairman John Moore.

“Our residents deserve to live in a vaccinated environment. Our staff deserves to work in a vaccinated environment,” Moore said.

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The Clairemont resident works in a food manufacturing lab, so back in February she knew she would be near the front of the line for a COVID-19 vaccine. But Bernice, who is not using her real name for privacy reasons, has multiple sclerosis. And at the time her symptoms were flaring up.

She had numbness on one side of her body, difficulty holding her young son and problems typing on a computer. There are drug treatments that alleviate these symptoms, but they suppress the patient’s immune system, making the vaccines far less effective. So, if Bernice were to take the treatments she couldn’t take the vaccine for six months.

But she really wanted a vaccine. She tried to hold on, dealing with the pain and numbness.

“I always feel like I’m pretty comfortable being uncomfortable because I’m a runner, so I was thinking, how much discomfort was I willing to accept?” she said. “And then at one point I was like, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’”

So she got her treatment. Two weeks later, food workers were granted authorization to get vaccines.

“It was very poor timing,” she said. “My coworkers were starting to get it. It wasn’t immediately frustrating, I feel like it’s more frustrating now that people are back to normal.”

Tuesday marks the state’s official reopening. Occupancy restrictions inside offices, stores, restaurants, bars and stadiums are gone and mask requirements greatly relaxed. Californians are celebrating their rediscovered freedoms. Except for Bernice and others who are in similar circumstances.

It’s already been difficult for Bernice, who won’t be able to get a vaccine until her course of treatments ends in August. Her company went back to in-person work a few months ago, and even with the guidelines that have been in place, almost all of her co-workers aren’t wearing masks.

She’s had to ask that all team lunches be held outside and was forced into an uncomfortable conversation with a maskless coworker during a recent training.

“He kept on coming over and looking at my computer, standing right over me,” she said. “I don’t know why it felt hard to have that conversation with him, but on the second day, I did ask him to put on a mask.”

Ignoring the most vulnerable

California is among the nation’s leaders in vaccination rates, with nearly 55% of adults fully vaccinated. But the state is still recording nearly 1,000 COVID-19 cases a day and public health experts say the realities facing Bernice and other chronically ill people aren’t getting enough consideration.

“We have not done a great job thinking about people with disabilities, we’ve only thought about the able-bodied throughout this pandemic, and that isn’t changing now,” said Rebecca Fielding-Miller, an epidemiologist at UC San Diego.

She said loosening mask rules in stores and workplaces put unfair burdens on people, further limiting the accessibility of public spaces for people who are already disabled, immunocompromised, or otherwise at higher risk.

“What it means is for everyone to be able to go into Target, buy a carton of ice cream and not have that be a terrifying experience,” she said. “So that means continuing masking rules. COVID is an occupational risk, so if people are forced to be indoors, then it’s the employer’s responsibility to create the healthiest possible workplace.”

Han Koehle, a health equity advocate at UC Santa Barbara, said ideally, policy decisions would focus on people with the least protection.

“Start with the most vulnerable in mind,” they said. “Keep the most at-risk person safe, then use that as the standard.”

They said people who are not vaccinated for medical reasons might be able to sue workplaces or stores under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

“People have the legal right to access public spaces, and as policies continue to unfold, there could be a civil rights recourse,” they said. “But that can take a long time. In the short term, people can also speak up in their own community and say we’re not leaving people behind. Vaccines are a community strategy, not an individual strategy.”

Fielding-Miller said while there are conflicting numbers for what percentage of people need to be vaccinated to achieve so-called “herd immunity,” there is no achievable number for full protection of everyone.

“People are so obsessed with herd immunity, but it’s a concept not a number, and it’s hard to calculate,” she said. “If we are using herd immunity as synonymous with eradication of COVID, that will never happen. We’ve eradicated one human disease ever, and that was smallpox, and it took years and years. With COVID, the best we can hope for is to keep it to a tolerable level while prioritizing people who are most likely to get very ill.”

Better than nothing

But that may not happen, which leaves people like Stacy Hall in North Park fearful about their health, and potentially their finances. Hall is on immunosuppressive medications to help with an autoimmune disease called eosinophilic fasciitis, and was told by her doctor to wait to get a COVID-19 vaccine.

But she works as a caretaker for elderly people and is worried people won’t want to hire her because she’s not vaccinated. She recently stopped working for one woman because she couldn’t visit her in an assisted living facility.

“I’m going to be a social pariah for not being vaccinated,” she said. “Recently I went to an outdoor party and the host met everyone out front. He asked, ‘are you vaccinated?’ I said, ‘no,’ so they wanted me to sit in the corner by myself with a mask.”

However, Dr. Davey Smith, an infectious disease specialist at UC San Diego, said people on immunosuppressive treatments should probably still get COVID-19 vaccines even if they won’t be as protected as a healthy person. The only people who should not take a vaccine are those with documented allergies to a vaccine ingredient, he said. For example, some people are allergic to polyethylene glycol, an ingredient in the Pfizer vaccine. Others have documented bad reactions to the adenovirus vector used in the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. “But other than those very, very rare cases, everyone should get the vaccine,” he said.

However, Smith does stress that the vaccines likely won’t produce a strong antibody response in the millions of people on immunosuppressive treatments. This group includes people with HIV or inflammatory diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn’s disease and with those who are undergoing chemotherapy or had an organ transplant.

“It dampens the immune system, so it dampens the response to vaccines, but does that mean they shouldn’t get them at all? Not at all, because we still hope they get some protection,” Smith said. “What I say to my patients is, ‘I’m going to give you the vaccine, but it might not work as well, so you need to go out into the world and be careful.’”

That’s the attitude taken by Bianca Santos, who had a kidney transplant four years ago and continues to take immunosuppressive drugs. She received both doses of the Moderna vaccine, but knows they may not be as effective on her, so she doesn’t feel the freedom many others experience post-vaccine.

She works at home and doesn’t shop in person. “I never get out of my car, the most I do is drive-thru,” she said. As a young person, Santos said it’s depressing to look at her friends’ social media accounts.

“While everyone else is thrilled about opening up, I still stay home and plan to stay home,” she said. “It’s very unclear to me when I’m free to be honest. Occasionally I feel sad and there are many moments when I do envy people with normal immunity after seeing their posts on social media.”

Claire Trageser | Contributed

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