COVID-19 cases and deaths surged across the National Nuclear Security Administration complex in summer’s final month, with active infections hitting levels not seen since November and the agency confirming three new fatalities this week alone.
At deadline, 25 people at the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) labs, plants and sites were confirmed to have died from complications related to COVID-19 since the disease was detected in the U.S. in January 2022, according to a spokesperson at agency headquarters in Washington.
Five of those people died in September, according to the NNSA spokesperson, including three this week: one at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, one at the Sandia National Laboratory’s California campus, and one at the Nevada National Security Site.
Active cases across the complex for the week ended Friday were at 384: down from the summer high of 447 earlier in September, but monumentally higher than the 93 active confirmed cases reported by NNSA one year ago, before the widespread availability of multiple free COVID vaccines.
By the end of the summer, in the final week of September, active NNSA-wide COVID cases had on average risen more than six-fold, compared with the average active case rate as of the final week of June.
Multiple NNSA sites reported through spokespersons this week that they had not yet made mandatory COVID vaccinations a condition of employment, as a presidential executive order from Sept. 9 mandated. The Los Alamos National Laboratory was the only NNSA site at deadline to mandate vaccines.
That said, the broader DOE, like other federal agencies, was at deadline still awaiting guidelines about vaccine mandates for contractors. The Safer Federal Workforce Task Force was scheduled to release a guidance for complying with President Joe Biden’s executive order on Friday.
Meanwhile, Tarak Shah, DOE’s chief of staff, this week sent DOE federal employees a memo giving them until Nov. 8 to get fully vaccinated against COVID-19. President Joe Biden’s Sept. 9 executive order gave civil servants, with limited exceptions, until Nov. 22 to get the vaccine.
According to Shah’s memo, DOE federal employees must receive their second shot of the two-shot Moderna or Pfizer vaccines, or the single-shot Johnson & Johnson injection, by Nov. 8.
That means there is an Oct. 11 deadline for DOE feds to receive their first shot of the Moderna vaccine and an Oct. 18 date for those planning to get their first dose of Pfizer. The makers of these two vaccines call for differing amounts of time between the first and second dose in order to reap the maximum benefit from the inoculation.
Those electing to go with the single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine only have one deadline to remember, Nov. 8.
It typically takes two weeks after the final dose of vaccine for the body to build up maximum protection or immunity against the virus that causes COVID-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
An NNSA spokesperson declined to comment about whether NNSA federal employees were being held to the same requirements as other DOE employees, writing in an email that the NNSA “strongly encourages the vaccination of all its employees.”
Wayne Barber contributed to this story from Washington.
Editor’s note, 09/27/2021, 11:48 a.m. Eastern time: the story was corrected to show the three sites at which NNSA confirmed employee deaths from COVID-19.
