AUGUSTA, Maine — The administration of Gov. Janet Mills is conducting a review that could lead to the state following the federal government and other Democratic-led states in ending a controversial vaccine mandate for health care workers.
Roughly half of states instituted vaccine mandates at some point during the pandemic, but Gov. Janet Mills put Maine’s 2021 requirement among the most rigid ones by allowing no testing alternative for workers who did not want to be vaccinated. Conservatives here rallied in opposition to it, turning the mandate into a wedge issue with the Democratic governor.
The national landscape has shifted over the last few months. The administration of President Joe Biden ended its mandate this month alongside ones for federal workers, international travelers and others. California moved in March to get rid of its requirement for health care workers, then New York followed suit last week after Biden’s plans were announced.
Maine still has not announced its plans, but the Mills administration is conducting “a review of the evidence base” for the rules and will consider proposing changes afterward, although there is no timeline for any changes, said Jackie Farwell, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services.
The state “will continue to be guided by science and evidence to protect the health of Maine residents, as we were in establishing the rules,” Farwell said.
The review comes during a hot political debate on the issue. Legislative Democrats voted this week to kill a Republican-led measure that would end the vaccine requirement and was opposed by health care interests, including hospital networks and other groups representing doctors.
Hundreds of health care workers left their jobs in the days following Maine’s mandate taking effect in late 2021, a period that was followed by a COVID-19 surge that challenged hospitals. But the overall effect of the mandate on health care arrangements was unclear, and employment rebounded slightly in hospitals and other health providers over the course of 2022.
At Brewer-based Northern Light Health, 381 of 12,000 employees declined to be vaccinated, according to legislative testimony this year. But the state’s second-largest health provider opposed a bill from Rep. David Boyer, R-Poland, that aimed to erode the mandate, as did MaineHealth, the largest provider, and the Mills administration.
The latter part of the pandemic has been marked by increasingly common “breakthrough” cases in fully vaccinated people, although studies have found those cases are rarely among the most serious. A recent study in a California prison found vaccinated people were less likely to transmit the virus, as were those who had been infected with COVID-19 before.
Democrats killed Boyer’s bill in a 21-14 vote in the Senate on Wednesday, with only Sen. Craig Hickman, D-Winthrop, crossing party lines to vote with Republicans. That followed a long debate in the House on Tuesday night in which conservatives lined up to argue for the proposal.
“Why is Maine the holdout on this unscientific policy?” Boyer said on the floor.
The Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention opposed an initial version of Boyer’s bill that attempted to overturn part of a 2019 law repealing nonmedical exemptions to vaccine mandates. The latest version would have directed the Mills administration to repeat it.
But times have changed on the mandate. When the Biden administration announced it would wind mandates down in May, it noted vastly reduced deaths and hospitalizations due in large part to vaccines, saying “we are in a different phase of our response to COVID-19 than we were when many of these requirements were put into place.”
And the Maine Hospital Association, which lobbied for the mandate in 2021, would welcome a conversation about bringing Maine into alignment with the federal rules outside the politically charged Legislature, lobbyist Jeff Austin said.
“I’ve had a lot of hallway conversations with folks about it, but I think it’s probably best if we attempt to go through a different policy-making path than through [the State House],” he said.