This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

I wrote the other day about the fact that, surprisingly, in Oregon, health care employers don’t have the legal ability to require their workers to get vaccinated.

The culprit is a 30-year-old law that has nothing to do with Covid, but still has an incredibly terrible effect – health care workers that you and I see might not be vaccinated.

Late news is that a couple of Oregon’s largest private health care systems – Kaiser and Oregon & Sciences University — are bucking the state law by requiring their health care workers to get the vaccine.  

And, even later news is that, under the headline below, the Oregonian newspaper reports that Governor Kate Brown has taken action to require health care workers to submit to weekly Covid tests or be vaccinated.  In other words, it is a vaccine mandate through, first, a required Covid test.

Here is the headline and several paragraphs from the story:

Oregon health care workers must get COVID-19 shots or submit to weekly testing, governor says

“Oregon health care workers will have to get vaccinated for COVID-19 or face weekly testing, Governor Kate Brown’s office said, in an apparent step to fight the state’s run-away coronavirus case numbers fueled by the delta variant.

“The move comes amid a nationwide push to drive up vaccination rates, both for the general public and among health care workers in particular. Brown’s intervention effectively neutralizes an Oregon law that says employers can’t fire health care workers for not being vaccinated.

“Brown’s order, through the Oregon Health Authority, sidesteps the law by mandating weekly testing while allowing for an exemption from the requirement for those who can prove they’ve been immunized.

“This new safety measure is necessary to stop delta from causing severe illness among our first line of defense: our doctors, nurses, medical students, and frontline health care workers,” Brown said in a statement announcing the change. “Severe illness from COVID-19 is now largely preventable, and vaccination is clearly our best defense.”

[I add that it also would give me solace when I visit a clinic or another health care provider and see health care workers.]

“Brown’s move comes less than three weeks after The Oregonian/OregonLive highlighted the unique problems Oregon’s health care system and patients face due to an obscure law dating to 1989, which prohibits those systems from requiring vaccinations among employees and firing those who refuse. 

“Oregon appears to be the only state in the nation with the prohibition specifically for health care workers, and one of the sponsors of the bill was perplexed by the ramifications, saying, ‘Why the hell did we do that?’

“’Scrutiny of the law came too late for lawmakers to act this year,’ said Representative Lisa Reynolds, D-Portland, who has said she believes it should be changed.”

It is likely that the Legislature, in its short-session in February, will set out to change the 30-year-old law.

The probable action will occur against a backdrop of various companies enacting vaccine mandates, as in these three examples:

• CNN has fired three staff members for working in the office despite being unvaccinated against the coronavirus, in an incident that highlights the potential challenges facing employers who mandate inoculations amid a surge of the highly transmissible delta variant in the United States.
• United Airlines will require employees to be vaccinated against the coronavirus, the company announced Friday, becoming the first domestic airline to require the vaccine as a condition of employment.  The company’s mandate will apply to all 67,000 of its active, U.S.-based employees, the company said.
• A virus outbreak helped spur Good Samaritan, a system operating facilities for senior citizens in 22 states, to impose a vaccine mandate on its 16,000 staff members. 

Back to Oregon.  It will be interesting to see how health care unions and other interests in Oregon react to a vaccine mandate carved into Oregon law if one is proposed by legislators early next year.

For me, employee survival, if not vitality, is on the side of a mandate.  That should be enough to support it.