UNC Health’s deadline for COVID vaccination is Tuesday; not everyone will make it
As many as 175 employees of UNC Health could lose their jobs by day’s end Tuesday for not complying with the health system’s COVID-19 vaccination mandate policy.
That means 99.4% of the 29,000 UNC Health workers covered by the policy have complied, by either getting vaccinated against COVID-19 or obtaining a waiver from UNC for either medical or religious reasons.
Even so, Dr. Matt Ewend, chief clinical officer at UNC Health, said he has mixed emotions about the outcome.
“I’m a little conflicted,” Ewend said Monday. “Ninety-nine point four is a really good performance, but in my heart I wanted everybody. I didn’t want to lose a single person.”
UNC becomes the second Triangle-based health care system to reach a deadline for its employees to either become vaccinated against COVID-19 or obtain a waiver. In late September, Duke Health said it had let go fewer than 20 of its 23,000 employees who refused to comply with Duke’s mandate policy.
WakeMed employees have until Nov. 12 to either get their first dose of COVID vaccine or obtain a waiver.
Ewend said 95% of its employees are now vaccinated, and that a little more than 4% received exemptions. About 260 of the exemptions were for medical reasons, and about 1,000 were granted on religious grounds.
‘A very powerful and personal decision’
Ewend said the medical exemptions are similar to the number UNC grants each year for the flu shot, which it also requires. But the religious exemptions were double or more than the number UNC allows for the flu.
“It’s a very powerful and personal decision, and people approached it through different lenses,” Ewend said. “I think for folks who have a really strong faith and religious component to their life, it fed into this narrative more than the flu shot does, because it was a bigger part of the social discussion than the flu shot is.”
A little more than 6% of Duke employees were granted a waiver from the vaccine requirement for either medical or religious reasons.
Health care workers were among the first eligible to get vaccinated against COVID-19 when limited supplies of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were initially released in December 2020. Hospital leaders in North Carolina encouraged workers to get vaccinated but did not require it, in part because the Food and Drug Administration had authorized use of the vaccines on an emergency basis.
But by summer, vaccination rates among hospital workers had plateaued around 70% as the more contagious delta variant of the virus was fueling another rise in cases. Hospital leaders decided that with tens of millions of people safely vaccinated nationwide, they could require it of their employees.
On July 22, all three Duke Health hospitals and several UNC Health hospitals in the Triangle and elsewhere joined hospital systems in Charlotte, Greensboro and Winston-Salem in announcing vaccination mandates. WakeMed joined them a month later.
Some employees resigned
In addition to firing up to 175 workers, UNC Health has had 115 employees resign since July, citing the vaccine requirement.
Ewend said it’s too soon to say whether UNC will require its employees to get booster shots of the coronavirus vaccines. That’s in part because the health system wants to see what the federal government might do about workplace vaccination policies and requirements, he said.
“Our belief is that our workforce should be protected and not transmitting the virus. So if the data tends to show that we need to do other things to keep that workforce protected, we won’t change that belief,” he said. “I imagine that most of us have not had our last COVID shot.”
