More than 90% of the federal employees and contract workers at the Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup branch have now been vaccinated against COVID-19, with more than 2,000 apparently still not taking the shot.
“The vast majority of our [Environmental Management] EM workforce is vaccinated,” a spokesperson for the DOE Office of Environmental Management said via email late Monday in response to an inquiry from Weapons Complex Monitor.
Across the cleanup complex, nearly 94% of EM’s 1,900-plus federal workers have been vaccinated and 91% of its 25,750 contract employees have been vaccinated, the spokesperson said.
Based on these percentages, it appears roughly 120 employees who work directly for the Office of Environmental Management and about 2,300 workers on the payroll of EM’s contractors have not yet been vaccinated against the illness that has infected more than 50 million Americans and killed 799,000 of them, according to figures compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
At the end of October, EM had recorded 7,100 confirmed active cases of COVID-19 since the pandemic took hold in the United States in early 2020.
Last week, a federal judge blocked a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for federal contractors. Most DOE site operations teams had mandates inserted into contracts following executive orders issued in September by President Joe Biden.
Biden’s now-enjoined executive order effectively mandated nearly all federal staff and contract workers be vaccinated against COVID-19 or get new jobs, except for those who qualify for religious or medical exemptions.
The DOE spokesperson said the agency will give letters of counseling through Jan. 5, but won’t “impose suspension” of any employees. “We will revisit those steps in early January,” the spokesperson said in a follow-up email Tuesday.
