Most National Nuclear Security Administration sites have given employees until Dec. 8 to get vaccinated, but some people at labs in New Mexico have already been terminated for refusing to at least begin a vaccine course.
At the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the northern part of the state, nearly 300 people have left the laboratory recently or gone on unpaid leave, according to someone familiar with management’s assessment of recent employee separations.
The tally includes some 130 retirements, about as many people who took unpaid leave — the lab’s sole accommodation for people who refuse to get vaccinated because of their religious beliefs — and 30 people who were fired for refusing to get either vaccine or an exemption to the mandate, the source said.
About 30 people got medical exemptions to Los Alamos’ vaccine mandate, which requires employees of lab manager Triad National Security to be fully vaccinated by Oct. 15, unless they have a religious or medical exemption. Medical exemptions are treated like disability accommodations.
Meanwhile, in Albuquerque, only four people were terminated at the Sandia National Laboratories for refusing to attest to their vaccination status, a spokesperson for the New Mexico-based labs network wrote in a Thursday email to Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
“COVID-19 is a threat to our communities and workplace that could affect our ability to fulfill our mission on behalf of the American people,” the Sandia spokesperson wrote. “Vaccination is the best tool to protect each other and provide our staff a safe on-site environment where we can continue to advance the boundaries of science and engineering and strengthen our national security.”
Sandia, like almost every major National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) site other than Los Alamos, has given employees until Dec. 8 to get vaccinated, in accordance with recently completed unilateral contract modifications. It takes two weeks to become fully vaccinated after taking the single-shot Johnson and Johnson vaccine, and about a month to become fully vaccinated from a two-shot regimen of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines.
An official with the NNSA has said that most of the agency’s major site operations contracts had been modified to include a COVID-19 vaccination mandate. That includes the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, Los Alamos, Sandia National, the Kansas City National Security Complex in Missouri, the Nevada National Security Site, the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas, and the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
As in prior weeks, some NNSA employees, and like-minded people, protested the federal vaccine mandate for contractors.
An anti-vaccine-mandate protest of about 100 people broke out near the Pantex Plant on Thursday, according to someone familiar with the details of the gathering across the road from the site’s John C. Drummond Center.
In Los Alamos, people were to protest the vaccine mandate on Monday State Road 4 between White Rock Library and Pajarito Road, according to a notice from the grassroots group New Mexico Freedoms Alliance.
