Thursday, December 10, 2020

University Of Pittsburgh Medical Center Won't Require Staff To Take COVID-19 Vaccine Due To 'General Uncertainty'


The prestigious University of Pittsburgh Medical Center requires its health care employees to receive the flu vaccine. But it won’t make them get the COVID-19 vaccine, which UPMC expects to begin offering to employees as soon as this month, reports PennLive.com.

Dr. Graham Snyder, UPMC’s medical director of infection prevention and hospital epidemiology, said UPMC’s mandatory flu vaccination policy “is based on decades of experience with the influenza vaccine.”

But there’s no comparable data for a COVID-19 vaccine, Snyder said on Tuesday.

“Until we learn more and build our own experience with this vaccine, plus, until we see the uptake of vaccine in our communities, and have an understanding about the role that vaccination has in ending this pandemic, it’s not the right thing to make it mandatory,” he said.

-RW

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