Jill Hruby, who became administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration in the second year of the global COVID-19 pandemic, praised the Los Alamos National Laboratory this week for requiring lab personnel to get vaccinated against the disease.
“I applaud the decision that Dr. Mason and Triad have made to protect their people from this pandemic while they continue to meet the Laboratory’s critical mission requirements as COVID-19 case rates continue to rise in northern New Mexico and across the country,” Hruby wrote Tuesday in an agency-wide email. “NNSA’s success depends on the health and wellbeing of both our Federal workforce and those of our laboratories, plants, sites, and others.”
Los Alamos announced on Monday that it will require all lab employees, contractors and subcontractors to get fully vaccinated and furnish proof of the vaccination to the site’s occupational medicine office, lest they be referred to human resources “for determination of whether employment will continue.”
Lab Director Thomas Mason handed down the order the same day the Food and Drug Administration fully approved Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine for everyone aged 16 and older. The vaccine had been distributed previously, to millions of Americans, under an emergency use authorization.
At deadline, no other National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) sites had publicly followed Los Alamos’ lead.
“The authority and decision to mandate vaccines as a condition of employment at our labs, plants, and sites rests with our Management & Operating partners,” Hruby wrote in her message to NNSA hands. “Many of the leaders of these companies have shared with me their desire to keep their people safe as their number one priority as the Delta variant spreads. As long as they meet the federal guidelines, other more forward-leaning decisions are up to them.”
