The union representing California state correctional officers plans to fight vaccination requirements for its members, according to a Friday memo.

The California Correctional Peace Officers Association said in the emailed note to members that it would use “all the tools at its disposal,” including legal appeals and labor negotiations, to fight two recent efforts to mandate vaccinations.

The union is not contesting a July 26 order from Gov. Gavin Newsom that said most state workers must get vaccinated. That order gave workers an alternative to vaccination by allowing them to get tested regularly and to wear a mask at work.

A federal overseer of medical care inside California prisons asked a judge on Thursday to require vaccines for everyone coming and going from the prisons, including employees, without the exceptions in Newsom’s prior order.

On Friday, the state Department of Public Health ordered all employees working at health care facilities to be fully vaccinated by Sept. 30.

The union memo, which CCPOA’s executive council sent in an email to members, said that since most prisons have health care facilities, the requirement would apply to its members. The state’s 34 prisons offer varying degrees of medical care on-grounds.

As of this week, the vaccination order doesn’t apply to prison health care facilities, the Public Health Department’s press office said in an email. Prisons remain under Newsom’s order that directs state workers either show proof of vaccination or submit to regular COVID-19 testing.

The press office’s email said the department plans to issue new guidance for “congregate settings” including prison health care facilities, adult and senior care facilities and homeless shelters in the future.

The union’s memo said it would ask the state to halt the Public Health Department’s order on the grounds it violates the employees’ contract. The memo said the union would seek a temporary pause to the vaccination order until it could meet and confer with the state over the issue, according to the memo.

“CCPOA believes both of these orders exceed what is medically necessary to slow and prevent the spread of COVID inside the institutions,” the memo states.

Public Health Officer Tomás J. Aragón said in last week’s order California needed to take more aggressive action to slow the spread of the delta variant of the coronavirus.

The state is in the midst of the “fastest increase in COVID-19 cases during the entire pandemic with 18.3 new cases per 100,000 people per day, with case rates increasing ninefold within two months,” Aragón said in the order.

Federal receiver J. Clark Kelso, who oversees medical care inside the state’s prisons under longstanding court orders, asked U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar in San Francisco last week to mandate vaccines for all prison employees.

Kelso said in a court filing that the delta variant of the coronavirus poses “enormous risks” inside the state’s institutions, where about 52% of employees were fully vaccinated as of Monday and fewer than 40% were fully vaccinated at six institutions.

The CCPOA memo restates the position the union took in court, saying it supports voluntary vaccinations but not mandates.

The Public Health Department’s order, according to CCPOA’s memo, “is too broad and does not consider the actual health and safety of the staff or the nature of the COVID threat in the institutions.”

Dr. Joseph Bick, the California Correctional Health Care Services’ director of health care services, said in court filings that he supported vaccine requirements for employees in order to prevent more “large-scale outbreaks.”

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https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/the-state-worker/article253378123.html#storylink=cpy