As deadline for vaccine mandate nears, Cape nursing homes expect few holdouts

Sep. 4—A small number of nursing home employees plan to leave their jobs rather than comply with a state COVID-19 vaccination mandate, but the majority of workers who have held off on the shots are rolling up their sleeves in time to meet an October deadline for immunization, Cape nursing home officials said.

Two or three employees among the 300 individuals working for Broad Reach Healthcare in North Chatham have indicated they do not intend to get vaccinated against COVID-19, Broad Reach president and CEO Bill Bogdanovich said.

"It will essentially mean they are not able to work in our settings anymore."

Nursing home employees have until Oct. 10 to be fully immunized, according to a state mandate announced in early August.

The Baker-Polito administration Wednesday announced plans to also mandate COVID-19 vaccination for employees of rest homes, assisted living residences and hospice programs as well as those providing in-home, direct care services.

The plan needs approval from the Public Health Council and would require vaccinations to be complete by Oct. 31.

With 78.46% of nursing home staff vaccinated against COVID-19, Massachusetts has the nation's sixth highest vaccination rate, behind Hawaii, Washington, D.C., Guam, California and Vermont, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

Cape nursing homes are included in the state's high nursing home employee vaccination rates, ranging from 70.4% at Bourne Manor to 98.9% at Liberty Commons in Chatham as of the week ending Aug. 22, according to the CMS.

"We went into it with a pretty high vaccination rate already. There were really only a handful of people who had not committed to vaccination," Bogdanovich said.

Liberty Commons is the nursing home run by Broad Reach while the Victorian is its assisted living facility.

Bogdanovich said that approximately eight employees are being vaccinated as a result of the mandates.

Two Broad Reach employees have asked for religious exemptions and one has been granted, he said.

The state is allowing nursing homes to consider granting vaccine exemptions in cases of sincerely held religious beliefs.

But for some individuals, refusing the vaccination is more a political issue.

"There's definitely an anti-mandate flavor to the resistance we've seen," Bogdanovich said.

One employee left "because the government is not going to tell them what to do," said Susan Tighe, who works in medical records at Windsor Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in South Yarmouth.

"A lot of people are still afraid to get it," Tighe said.

A woman who worked for an agency that provided physical therapy services to Windsor clients went to Texas at least in part to avoid the mandate, Tighe said.

Texas ranks in the bottom half of the nation for nursing home staff vaccinations, with completed rates of only 58.9%, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

That could change if a federal mandate comes to fruition. President Joe Biden announced Wednesday that his administration will require nursing home staff be vaccinated against COVID-19 as a condition of receiving federal Medicaid and Medicare funding.

Delmay Lopes, a dietary aide at South Dennis Healthcare, said she got the Pfizer vaccine as soon as it became available to employees of the nursing home.

"There's a couple" of holdouts, she said. "But mainly everybody in the building is vaccinated now."

Lopes, who lost her unvaccinated nephew to COVID-19 a couple of months ago, said she is also planning on getting the booster shot.

Even though she is fully vaccinated, Lopes said she wears a mask around people she suspects have not received the shots.

"I'm not risking it," she said.

Health officials said the goal of the vaccination mandates is to protect the state's most vulnerable and frail residents against COVID-19 and its variants.

Nursing homes across the nation were hit hard by the pandemic, with scores of elderly residents succumbing to the novel virus on Cape Cod.

The delta variant that swept through Provincetown this summer resulted in mainly mild illness among vaccinated people, but three elderly residents at Maplewood at Mayflower Place in West Yarmouth died after contracting the virus.

"For the safety of the residents (vaccinating staff) is the right thing to do," Bogdanovich said.

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