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Quick Fix
— Advocates are mounting civil rights challenges to red-state bans on school mask mandates, arguing they discriminate against kids with disabilities.
— The health department has diverted billions of dollars in Covid-19 aid money to cover the care of thousands of unaccompanied immigrant minors.
— Delta Air Lines will charge unvaccinated employees higher insurance premiums, in what could emerge as a corporate alternative to blanket vaccination requirements.
WELCOME TO THURSDAY PULSE — where for both journalism and health devotees (and health journalism devotees), our David Lim will be talking Covid-19 reporting tonight at AAJA’s 2021 Convention. Send tips to [email protected] and [email protected].
Driving the Day
THE LEGAL TACTIC THAT COULD BEAT GOP MASK BANS — Organizations battling GOP governors’ bans on school mask requirements are coalescing behind a single legal argument: prohibiting mask mandates equals discriminating against disabled students.
The claim underpins lawsuits from Texas and Florida to South Carolina, as disability rights advocates lead the effort to defeat mask bans imposed on school districts, POLITICO’s Michael Stratford reports.
If successful, it could serve as a blueprint for the Biden administration’s own offensive against GOP governors attempting to overrule local school officials — one that President Joe Biden escalated last week by instructing his Education Department to take aggressive action against state leaders standing in the way.
The challenges lean heavily on federal civil rights laws and contend that Republican states forcing schools to make masks optional leaves parents of disabled children with two unenviable choices: either risk their kid’s health by sending them to school or risk their education by keeping them home.
That violates legal requirements that schools receiving federal funding ensure students with disabilities get a “free, appropriate, public education,” advocates say.
“Prohibiting schools from requiring universal masking is essentially excluding students with disabilities from school,” said Susan Mizner of the American Civil Liberties Union.
GOP governors have yet to back down. Though Texas and South Carolina have yet to respond to the suits, Florida offered a hint at one potential line of defense with its assertion that affected families should work out individual education plans with their local school — not seek to overturn policy statewide.
State leaders in favor of the mask bans have also justified them as being designed to give parents control over the choices made for their children instead of leaving it up to school districts.
FIRST IN PULSE: COVID AID FUELS HHS’ BORDER WORK — HHS is drawing on billions of dollars in Covid-19 relief money to finance its care for record numbers of unaccompanied immigrant minors, according to new figures reviewed by PULSE.
That includes diverting roughly $364 million that Congress originally allocated to help with the administration’s vaccination campaign. Another $864.5 million came from funding earmarked for various parts of the department, like HHS’ public health workforce and CDC’s global health operations.
And in two separate transfers this summer, HHS rerouted more than $1 billion combined that Congress initially designated for the NIH as part of its December Covid aid bill.
An HHS spokesperson downplayed the moves, noting they account for only a fraction of the Covid funds allocated to HHS — and that they wouldn’t disrupt any department activities.
But the reshuffling offers a window into the growing financial toll that caring for thousands of unaccompanied kids is taking on HHS — and a reminder that the administration is still grappling with an unprecedented influx of migrants at its southern border.
HHS recorded more than 15,000 migrant children in its custody Wednesday, a number that’s forced the department to rely for much of the year on emergency shelters — some of which are now under scrutiny over allegations of poor conditions. The pandemic has made things more difficult; testing and quarantining at the shelters has so far cost at least $2 billion, HHS said.
In May, POLITICO reported on the complicating factors that thrust HHS into the center of the immigration emergency — and forced it to reroute more than $2 billion in funding meant for other health initiatives.
That total has now topped $4.4 billion — and is expected to keep growing from here.
Vaccines
DELTA PLANS HEALTH ‘SURCHARGE’ FOR UNVACCINATED WORKERS — The airline will tack an additional $200 a month onto employees’ health care costs if they refuse to get vaccinated — making it the first major U.S. company to tie vaccination status to its insurance plan.
Delta CEO Ed Bastian justified the approach based on how much it could cost the company if an unvaccinated employee ends up in the hospital — a figure he pegged at an average of $50,000. All the Delta workers hospitalized with Covid-19 in recent weeks have been unvaccinated, Bastian wrote in a memo.
Those holdouts will also face an array of other restrictions, including regular testing and indoor mask-wearing. But attaching a health premium represents a significant step that other corporations could soon take as well — and that policy experts have hotly debated in recent days.
The appeal is straightforward, POLITICO’s Eleanor Mueller, Oriana Pawlyk and Tatyana Monnay report: It may be easier for employers to rationalize the policy as a financial decision than to simply impose a blanket mandate. There’s also a precedent where companies have tried to discourage smoking by tying it to a higher insurance premium.
But it’s also less effective. There’s limited evidence that charging smokers more convinces them to quit instead of nudging them into unintended behaviors like deferring care. And if the goal is to get the highest percentage of workers vaccinated as quickly as possible, no tactic will work better than mandating it as a condition of employment.
One more thing: Employers have broad leeway to use incentives aimed at improving their workforces’ health. But hiking premiums on the unvaccinated nevertheless risks raising more uncomfortable questions about what other behaviors companies can charge workers more for.
TEXAS GOV BANS ALL VAX MANDATES — GOP Gov. Greg Abbott is broadening his ban on Covid-19 vaccine mandates regardless of their approval status, in a move that comes just days after the FDA granted full licensure to Pfizer’s shot, POLITICO’s Myah Ward writes.
The executive order builds on an initial prohibition of mandates for vaccines authorized for emergency use — a directive that for a brief period appeared to indicate state or local officials could require the just-approved Pfizer vaccine.
But on Wednesday, Abbott extended the ban to include any and all Covid shots, allowing carve-outs only for nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. The governor is also asking Texas’ legislature to take its own action on whether state or local entities can mandate the vaccines, calling it “particularly important to avoid a patchwork of vaccine mandates across Texas.”
The move comes as Abbott’s state is in the midst of a Covid-19 surge, and as the governor himself is recovering from his own case — although he credited the vaccine for ensuring his bout would be “brief & mild.” Texas is now averaging more than 16,000 new cases a day, a fourfold increase from just a month ago.
It also means the state could be in for a showdown with at least one school district in San Antonio, which is requiring its employees to get vaccinated. The state attorney general has already sued over the mandate, but district officials told the Texas Tribune Wednesday they wouldn’t back down even after Abbott’s order.
What We're Reading
The head physician at an Arkansas jail has treated inmates for Covid-19 with an animal deworming drug that the FDA has warned could be dangerous, The Daily Beast’s Andrew Boryga reports.
The European Union is weighing reimposing Covid-related travel restrictions on the U.S., Bloomberg News’ Jasmina Kuzmanovic, Andra Timu and Siddharth Vikram Philip report.
A Missouri plan to test for Covid-19 in schools has fallen well short of its ambitions, in a sign of how difficult it will be to keep the virus out of classrooms, Kaiser Health News’ Rachana Pradhan reports.
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The legal tactic that could beat GOP mask bans - Politico
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