Patients can ask hospitals whether their caregivers are vaccinated but hospitals don’t have to answer them, and routinely won’t, according to Cortland and hospital executives around the country. Studies show that unvaccinated individuals are more likely to contract and transmit the virus.Įmployees in all states are required to have their first shot, and those in about half the states are supposed to have their second shot by Monday. “If I knew that a health care worker was unvaccinated, I would not consent to their involvement in my care,” said Matthew Cortland, a disability rights attorney who takes immunosuppressants and is a senior fellow at Data for Progress, a progressive think tank. POLITICO found in an analysis of federal data. hospitals, likely due to insufficient control measures, Last month, as Omicron surged, more patients than at any time of the pandemic caught Covid in U.S. But public health experts and patient advocates fear that widespread use of the exemptions risks infecting patients with the virus, even as Covid-19 cases decline rapidly from their January peak. Several hospital executives told POLITICO their prevalence has helped keep the hospital from laying off dozens of employees, which would threaten their ability to provide patient care.

While the federal government doesn’t track the number of religious exemptions, anecdotal evidence indicates they are widespread in health care settings. Hospital officials from several states said they created simple forms to meet the administration’s mandate, which requires all health workers, including those not directly involved in patient care, to either get vaccinated or have a hospital-approved religious or medical exemption.

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