Some of the country's largest hospital systems have dropped COVID-19 vaccine mandates for employees after a federal judge temporarily halted President Joe Biden's vaccine mandate for healthcare workers, The Wall Street Journal reported.
A U.S. District Court judge in Louisiana stopped the vaccine mandate for healthcare workers on Nov. 30.
As a result, hospital operators such as HCA Healthcare Inc. and Tenet Healthcare Corp., and nonprofits including AdventHealth and the Cleveland Clinic, are dropping the mandates, the Journal reported Monday.
Hospitals have struggled to retain enough nurses, technicians, and janitors amid higher COVID-19 hospitalizations due to the delta variant.
The Journal reported that hospital executives, public-health officials, and nursing groups said that vaccine mandates have been a factor in lowering the supply of healthcare workers.
"It's been a mass exodus, and a lot of people in the healthcare industry are willing to go and shop around," Wade Symons, an employee-benefits lawyer and head of consulting firm Mercer's U.S. regulatory practice, told the Journal.
"If you get certain healthcare facilities that don’t require it, those could be a magnet for those people who don’t want the vaccine. They’ll probably have an easier time attracting labor."
Thousands of nurses left the industry or lost their jobs rather than get vaccinated, the Journal said.
As of September, 30% of workers at more than 2,000 hospitals across the country surveyed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were unvaccinated.
"We continue to strongly encourage our colleagues to be vaccinated as a critical step to protect individuals from the virus," HCA spokesman Harlow Sumerford told the Journal.
Even before the pandemic, many hospitals struggled to find workers due to job burnout and, in the case of nurses, opportunities to seek high-paying jobs by going to national hot-spot areas on short-term contracts.
U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty’s ruled that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services didn’t have the authority to mandate vaccines for healthcare workers. The mandate affected nearly 10 million workers and required all employees at facilities that participate in Medicare and Medicaid to get second shots by Jan. 4.
"If the executive branch is allowed to usurp the power of the legislative branch to make laws, two of the three powers conferred by our Constitution would be in the same hands," Doughty wrote. "If human nature and history teach anything, it is that civil liberties face grave risks when governments proclaim indefinite states of emergency.
"During a pandemic such as this one, it is even more important to safeguard the separation of powers set forth in our Constitution to avoid erosion of our liberties."
The American Hospital Association estimated that 2,640 facilities, 42% of U.S. hospitals, have COVID-19 vaccine mandates in place, the Journal reported.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.