#Biden is putting politics ahead of stopping the COVID spread

COVID infections in the United States leapt 47.5 percent last week from the previous week. Shots in arms, not shutdowns, are the answer. Among the big risks to Americans right now are unvaccinated health-care workers and unvaccinated illegal immigrants fanning out across the country. But President Joe Biden is putting politics ahead of tackling these two politically toxic problems.

Team Biden is banning foreign travelers from many countries, including the United Kingdom, even if they’re fully vaccinated. Yet the prez is OK with letting hundreds of thousands of unvaccinated foreigners wade across the Rio Grande to enter the United States via the southern border.

According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement data, more than 80 percent of these migrants are unvaccinated. Some come from countries such as Brazil and Peru that have high infection rates and worrisome variants. The vaccination rates in Honduras and Guatemala, the countries of origin for most border crossers, are less than 1 percent.

The Border Patrol doesn’t routinely test or vaccinate migrants when they’re apprehended, so data on infection rates are generally lacking. But when testing is done, the results are alarming. During a one-week period in California, a staggering 15 percent of migrants released into the community by the Border Patrol were found to be COVID-infected. 

Some of these migrants brought the disease from their home country or picked it up en route, while others caught it in crowded border detention facilities. Either way, once they’re processed by border authorities and board buses to far-away destinations such as New York and Chicago, they pose a national danger. Biden and Harris need to slam shut the border for health reasons.

The president also needs to use his bully pulpit to encourage health-care workers here in the United States to get vaccinated. Imagine you’re a hospital patient worrying that the nurse treating you or the attendant bringing your lunch has COVID. Nearly one in four hospital workers who has direct patient contact hasn’t received a single dose of vaccine, according to incomplete data from the Department of Health and Human Services. Incomplete because neither HHS nor the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made it a priority to get that information from all hospitals.

Vaccinating health-care workers is essential to make hospitals and nursing homes safe. That’s why they were put at the front of the line during the vaccine rollout. But vaccine reluctance is high, especially among female workers in lower-level jobs such as nursing assistants.

Some hospitals have mandated vaccines. NewYork-Presbyterian is giving all employees until Sept. 1 to get at least the first shot in order to keep their jobs. But the 1199SEIU health-care workers union plans to fight against the mandate, and the New York State Nurses Association also opposes it.

Houston Methodist in Texas fired 153 workers who refused to take the shots. When they sued, the courts upheld the hospital’s decision. No one has a constitutional right to be an unvaccinated health-care worker. Get the jab or get another job.

The United Kingdom took the radical step of mandating vaccinations for all nursing-home workers and is considering a requirement for all health-care workers. It’s no wonder. Data from earlier in the year show that 20 percent of patients hospitalized with COVID there contracted it in the hospital. They went in for something else and then got infected.

But Democrats, including Biden and Gov. Andrew Cuomo, apparently are so worried about offending union bigwigs that they won’t take sides on the urgency of vaccinating health-care workers. The president has said nothing, literally zip, about this serious health danger.

In New York, it would help if Cuomo were more vocal on the need for health-care workers to get shots. Among nursing-home staff, vaccination rates are often below 50 percent, even though their patients are very vulnerable. 

As a candidate, Biden promised to “follow the science.” But no surprise, he’s putting politics first. Biden is promising to go door-to-door to get people vaccinated. Going door-to-door works for getting out the vote, but it’s not enough to solve this public-health crisis.

Betsy McCaughey is the author of “The Next Pandemic” and chairman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths.

Twitter: @Betsy_McCaughey