Duke University orders all staff to get Covid-19 vaccine booster by Feb 1 or face the boot
Duke University has announced that it will require all faculty and staff to get a Covid-19 booster shot before the start of February or 28 days after they are eligible.
Any employee who fails to provide proof of a booster or apply for an exemption will be placed on administrative leave. If employees do not get booster-jabed within a week of their leave, they will be fired.
The policy is the strictest of the North Carolina colleges, with North Carolina State and UNC Chapel Hill requiring tests for staff and students returning to classes in January but not requiring vaccines or boosters.
Duke joins a raft of elite colleges which are pressing ahead with booster requirements, including Harvard, Yale, Notre Dame, Dartmouth, Columbia, Brown, Cornell and Syracuse.
It comes amid soaring cases of the rapidly spreading Omicron variant - with the US setting a record with a seven-day average of 254,496 cases reported on Tuesday as infections doubled on two weeks ago.
The famous Duke University gothic chapel in Durham, North Carolina
The country's previous record was about 251,989 daily cases, reported on January 11.
Universities are following CDC guidance which states hat the best protection against the new strain is a booster shot.
Dr Anthony Fauci said earlier this month that a booster shot increased antibody levels by more than 20 times when tested in a laboratory.
However, growing evidence that the new strain of the disease is milder is making the debate around vaccine mandates increasingly heated.
A federal appeals court on December 18 reinstated Joe Biden's vaccine mandate for private firms with more than 100 employees.
It means the battle will now move to the Supreme Court as various states rail against the rule from the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) that was to take effect next week.
The vaccine requirement would apply to companies with 100 or more employees and would cover about 84 million workers.
Employees who are not fully vaccinated would have to wear masks and be subject to weekly tests. There would be exceptions for those who work outdoors or only at home.
Republican-led states joined with conservative groups, business associations and some individual businesses to push back against the requirement as soon as OSHA published the rules in early November.
They argued that OSHA was not authorized to make the emergency rule.
The mandate had been blocked for now in 24 states - 14 involved in a case reviewed by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans and 10 where it was halted by a Nov. 29 ruling by a federal judge in St. Louis.
Biden unveiled in September regulations to increase the adult vaccination rate as a way of fighting the pandemic, which has killed more than 800,000 Americans and weighed on the economy.
Companies such as United Airlines have used mandates to increase the number of vaccinated employees, often with only a small number of workers refusing the shots.
However, as recently as Friday, several companies had decided to suspend vaccination requirements - including Boeing, Amtrak, Spirit AeroSystems and General Electric.
Republicans, conservative groups and trade organizations sued over the OSHA rule, arguing the agency overstepped its authority.
The rule set a January 4 deadline for compliance, although it unclear if that will be enforced because the rule was blocked for weeks.
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