With a federal COVID-19 vaccine mandate suspended at the site, employees put on unpaid leave because they would not take the vaccine were scheduled to return to work Monday at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a lab spokesperson told the Exchange Monitor.
“To comply with the federal court order and the state’s suspension of its COVID-19 exemptions, UT-Battelle has suspended enforcement of its COVID-19 vaccination policy for staff members and will rely on other safety controls, including masking and testing,” a spokesperson for the site’s management and operations contractor wrote in an email. “The staff members who were on unpaid leave as an accommodation have been notified that they should prepare to return to work by Dec. 13.”
UT-Battelle made the move after a federal judge in Georgia last week blocked the Joe Biden administration’s vaccine mandate for federal contractors.
The judge in Georgia enjoined the government from enforcing the mandate nationally. In October, a different federal judge, in Tennessee, declined to block the Oak Ridge lab’s mandate after half a dozen unvaccinated employees sued to stop it.
Most Department of Energy management and operations contracts had by then already been modified to include a vaccine mandate, but new federal guidance issued after the judge’s ruling allows contractors to suspend the mandates without any action from the agency.
Some DOE nuclear-weapon sites have decided to suspend the mandates and others have decided to keep the mandates. Not all contractors mandated vaccination because of the Biden administration’s Sept. 9 executive order, including the National Nuclear Security Administration’s contractor for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Triad National Security.
