Despite some court setbacks for federal vaccination orders, a top manager with the Department of Energy’s Jacobs-led cleanup contractor at the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York said Wednesday his organization is sticking with its COVID-19 vaccination mandate.
“We have actually chosen to maintain that mandate,” CH2M HILL BWXT West Valley’s president and general manager John Rendall told an online meeting of the West Valley Citizen Task Force. “Even though we work for the federal government we are a private entity.”
The company does not think the mandate will be a “forever thing,” Rendall said. Meanwhile, he said, everyone on site is either vaccinated or gotten an exemption for medical or “sincerely-held religious beliefs.”
West Valley contractor management said in December more than 90% of its workforce was inoculated against the illness that has killed more than 800,000 Americans so far. “We have a very high vaccination rate onsite, substantially higher than the larger county that we reside in,” Rendall said. As a result, West Valley has a much lower infection rate than the surrounding area. He added Western New York has been going through a spike in COVID cases, but did not provide any figures.
“Prior to the court injunction, CHBWV [CH2M HILL BWXT West Valley] strictly implemented the Safer Federal Workforce Task Force “COVID-19 Workplace Safety Guidance for Federal Contractors and Subcontractors” that called for full worker vaccination by Dec. 8.
