The benefits of having more nursing home staff take COVID-19 vaccines faded as the Omicron variant took hold, a new study of some 15,000 facilities across the United States suggests.
“When vaccines became available in December 2020, staff and residents in nursing homes were among the first to be deemed eligible for vaccination,” the researchers wrote, noting that staff vaccination rates varied substantially by facility before the Biden administration rolled out a vaccination mandate for all health care workers in November 2021.
Upon analyzing data reported to the federal health authorities by 15,042 nursing homes between May 30 to Dec. 5, 2021—an eight-month period before the Omicron wave hit, the team said higher rates of staff vaccinations did appear to have at least some protective benefits.
Specifically, the team said that increasing weekly staff vaccination rates by as little as 10 percentage points during that period was associated with 0.13 fewer weekly COVID-19 cases per 1,000 residents, 0.02 fewer weekly COVID-19 deaths per 1,000 residents, and 0.03 fewer weekly COVID-19 staff cases.
However, during the Omicron wave from Dec. 5, 2021, to Jan. 30, 2022, increasing staff vaccination rates in these same facilities appeared to no longer produce the same benefits.
“At the onset of the Omicron wave, nursing homes across the US witnessed sharp increases in cases and deaths from COVID-19 among both residents and staff,” the authors wrote, noting that facilities “exhibited little to no difference” in terms of COVID-19 cases and deaths regardless of whether they had higher or lower staff vaccination coverage.
The team said this has to do with the fact that Omicron is “more transmissible than the previous strains of the virus.”
They then concluded that policy makers should consider recommending or mandating additional booster shots, since the original 2-dose COVID-19 vaccine, as federally mandated in 2021, was no longer associated with better COVID-19 outcomes in nursing homes.
“Policy makers may want to consider longer-term policy options to increase the uptake of booster doses among staff in nursing homes,” they wrote.
The study came weeks after a federal judge in Louisiana tossed a case brought by 14 states challenging the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccination mandate for eligible staff at healthcare facilities participating in Medicare and Medicaid programs.
The lawsuit, led by Montana, is argued on the 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which states that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” The states claimed that the federal government simply lacks the constitutional authority to force their state-run hospitals to either fire unvaccinated employees or to quit Medicaid and Medicare.
“If a president can unilaterally force people to submit to a medical procedure they don’t want, then there’s seemingly no limit to the federal government’s control over our lives,” Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen said.
The lawsuit was brought by Montana, and joined by Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah, and West Virginia.
