ST PAUL, Minn. — Episcopal Homes resident George Latimer may have momentarily forgotten his own age, but there's no forgetting him. He was St. Paul's mayor from 1976 to 1990.
"I'm 84," Latimer said, followed by a pause and a laugh. "I'm sorry. I forgot I'm 86 now."
He says he's lived in the building for at least seven years. It's where he got vaccinated against COVID-19.
"It was a piece of cake," Latimer said. "I had two of them and they were very quick and well done. I had no aftermath problems at all."
While 80 percent of Episcopal employees are vaccinated, 20 percent are not. However, beginning September 1, all employees will be required to be vaccinated.
"We are definitely part of the beginning of a movement," said Marvin Plakut, Episcopal Homes' president and CEO.
Plakut says Episcopal Homes is one of the first long-term care facilities based in Minnesota to mandate COVID vaccines.
"COVID-19 has its greatest negative effect on the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions and that's who we're serving here at Episcopal Homes," he said. "So we just came to grips with the fact, over the last week, that the time has come. That we have a moral duty."
Plakut says the highly contagious delta variant contributed to the decision.
He says, since announcing the vaccine mandate, some employees have already decided to leave. He hopes having conversations with remaining unvaccinated employees over the next few weeks will indeed lead to immunizations not terminations.
"We have to be really careful to listen to them, hear where they're coming from, hear what their source of information is and then talk to them about, well, here's another perspective and this perspective is based on science," Plakut said. "What the science is saying is that when we get vaccinated we're not only helping ourselves we're helping our loved ones around us and we're helping the broader community."
Latimer agrees an empathetic approach is best.
"To some people, a vaccination of any kind is an invasion and some of it is religious some of it is cultural and so I really respect the difficulty of that decision," he said.