Eleven employees at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state on Monday informed their bosses they have tested positive for COVID-19, according to an online advisory.
The Leidos-led contractor, Hanford Mission Integration Solutions, which acts as a landlord or city manager for the former plutonium production complex, posted the development Monday evening on a website that includes various employee advisories, including emergency incidents and road closings. Most new COVID reports cited on the website in recent weeks have tended to involve only one or two new cases.
As of last week, there have been more than 7,100 cases of COVID-19 across the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management’s worksites, an office spokesman said last week.
Under executive orders in September by President Joe Biden, all federal contractors must be vaccinated against COVID-19 by early December or face termination unless they receive some type of medical or religious exemption. Legal challenges linked to implementation of vaccine mandates have been filed or at least announced for the Hanford Site, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
