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VOA \u2014 WASHINGTON – U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy on Sunday defended President Joe Biden\u2019s new directives requiring millions of workers to get vaccinated against the coronavirus under the possible threat of losing their jobs, although there is widespread opposition from Republican state governors.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is not an unusual step,\u201d Murthy told ABC\u2019s \u201cThis Week\u201d show. \u201cThis is an appropriate response.\u201d<\/p>\n With about 150,000 new delta variant coronavirus cases and 1,500 more deaths being recorded daily in the United States, Biden last week directed businesses with 100 employees or more to mandate vaccinations for their workers or require the employees to undergo weekly COVID-19 testing if they refuse inoculations.<\/p>\n About 80 million workers throughout the U.S. economy, the world\u2019s largest, could be affected by the Biden mandate, potentially costing them their jobs if they refuse vaccinations or testing.<\/p>\n The president also ordered about 2.5 million workers employed by the national government to get the shot if they haven\u2019t already, and he ended a previous option they had for weekly testing if they choose not to get the vaccine.<\/p>\n Some large companies had already started mandating vaccinations and executives at major businesses have generally voiced support for Biden\u2019s orders. But 19 Republican governors, many of them frequent critics of the Democratic president, have objected to his directives and say they are considering legal challenges.<\/p>\n One of the Republican governors, Nebraska\u2019s Pete Ricketts, told the \u201cFox News Sunday\u201d show that the president\u2019s orders are an \u201cegregious overreach\u201d by the national government.<\/p>\n Ricketts said he has heard from many workers who are afraid they will be fired if they are forced to take the shot.<\/p>\n \u201cYou shouldn\u2019t have to make a choice between keeping your job or getting a jab in the arm,\u201d Ricketts said. \u201cThere’s just a lot of people who don’t know what to trust right now,\u201d even though federal health regulators have given full approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and emergency use authorization for the Moderna vaccine, the two most commonly administered coronavirus vaccines in the U.S.<\/p>\n Ricketts said that for some people, hesitancy \u201cis really an outcome of what the [U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention]\u00a0has done because they\u2019ve flip-flopped on so many issues,\u201d such as whether one should wear a mask if they have been vaccinated and under what circumstances.<\/p>\n \u201cIt should be a personal choice (whether to get vaccinated), not something mandated by the government,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Another Republican governor, Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, told NBC\u2019s \u201cMeet the Press\u201d show, \u201cThis is a very serious deadly virus, and we’re all together in trying to get an increased level of vaccination out in the population.\u201d<\/p>\n But he added, \u201cThe problem is that I’m trying to overcome resistance, but the president’s actions in a mandate hardens the resistance.\u201d<\/p>\n States throughout the country routinely require children to be vaccinated against communicable childhood diseases. Such requirements, Hutchinson said, \u201chave always come at the state level, never at the national level.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAnd so, this is an unprecedented assumption of federal mandate authority that really disrupts and divides the country,\u201d he said. \u201cIt divides our partnership between the federal government and the states, and it increases the division in terms of vaccination when we should all be together trying to increase the vaccination uptake.\u201d<\/p>\n Hutchinson said he, unlike some other Republican governors, supports the right of individual businesses to mandate inoculations for their workers.<\/p>\n \u201cBut to have the federal mandate will be counterproductive,\u201d he argued.<\/p>\n Months ago, Biden heralded what appeared to be a growing success in the fight against the coronavirus, but the delta variant has led to a new wave of concern, and the workplace vaccination mandates he ordered last week.<\/p>\n \u201cDelta is a tough foe,\u201d Murthy told ABC. \u201cIt\u2019s throwing curve balls at us.\u201d<\/p>\n But he said health officials \u201cknow these kinds of vaccinations work,\u201d and described Biden\u2019s orders as \u201cthe next step\u201d in fighting the virus that causes COVID-19.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" VOA \u2014 WASHINGTON – U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy on Sunday defended President Joe Biden\u2019s new directives requiring millions of workers to get vaccinated against the coronavirus under the possible threat of losing their jobs, although there is widespread opposition from Republican state governors. \u201cThis is not an unusual step,\u201d Murthy told ABC\u2019s \u201cThis Week\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":98343,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-98342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-recposts"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.2","language":"en","enabled_languages":["fa","en"],"languages":{"fa":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false},"en":{"title":false,"content":false,"excerpt":false}}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98342"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98342\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98345,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98342\/revisions\/98345"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/98343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n![\"FILE](\"https:\/\/im-media.voltron.voanews.com\/Drupal\/01live-166\/styles\/sourced_737px_wide\/s3\/2021-09\/ap21251582558121.jpg?itok=RrtHaE09\")
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