MINNEAPOLIS — With more than 56% of Minnesotans age 16 and older now at least partially vaccinated against COVID, healthcare providers have gone from keeping up with demand, to courting it.
Healthcare providers are alerting customers to hundreds of open appointments and public health officials are shifting their messaging.
"States are looking really carefully at who is not getting vaccinated and then they're trying to figure out why," said Elizabeth Weise, a national correspondent for USA Today, who has tracked vaccination efforts across the country. "In this instance, I think states are now down to the, 'Okay, we need to talk to very specific groups, very specifically about what their concerns are.'"
As state public health officials look to address those concerns, Weise says many state lawmakers around the country are voicing a different concern. Her USA Today investigation found lawmakers in 40 states have introduced legislation to ban COVID-19 vaccine requirements, despite concerns about the message they are sending.
"It's unclear if any of this legislation is going to pass," Weise said. "I have to say, when I started looking into this, it's really much ado about nothing. They're attempting to fix a problem that doesn't exist."
Nationwide, Weise says there's been just a single legal challenge to a workplace vaccine requirement so far. It was filed by a first responder inside a New Mexico corrections facility, but the judge didn't immediately step in because the employee has not been fired or demoted for refusing a shot.
"No one is requiring this of employees," Weise said. "The only places that you see pushing hard on employees to get vaccinated at this point are long term healthcare facilities and then hospitals. That's exactly what hospitals do with the flu vaccine. Very few hospitals actually require the flu vaccine for their employees, but what they say is, if you don't want to get the flu vaccine, there are certain jobs you just can't do."
Some colleges and universities, including Macalester College in St Paul, have said they'll require vaccines before students and faculty can return to campus in the fall, with limited exceptions. According to the announcement, students can request an exemption from the requirement using the same criteria as it has for other immunizations.
Weiss says that kind of requirement, and others like it at schools across the country, are unlikely to cause major conflicts.
"Nobody has yet said, 'Hey, I got into Macalester but I don't want to get vaccinated and you gave me a spot so now I'm going to sue,'" she said. "That could happen, but it hasn't happened yet."
Colleges, and even public K-12 schools, have long required certain vaccines. Weiss says the U.S. Supreme Court traditionally gives states the ability to decide who can opt out and why. She says that's a topic to watch in the coming months, especially as vaccines expand to younger groups.
"There are some states that very clearly say you can't ever force a child to get vaccinated, and there are some states that say we're going to make it really hard for you to opt out of being vaccinated," she said. "So there's kind of the whole gamut back and forth."
But when it comes to your employer, she says don't expect a hard and fast mandate.
"Employers, by and large, are going to do everything they can to keep it out of a lawsuit because that helps no one if you are an employer," she said. "We're not hearing this huge groundswell of employers who are saying, 'Oh yeah, we are 100% going to require vaccination.' They may encourage it, though. We've already seen some employers encouraging it with, we're talking like a $200 gift card, and that's going to go a long way to overcoming some hesitancy I imagine."