Sacramento bars shouldn’t have to require COVID vaccines. It’s employers who need to act

The decision for Torch Club owner Marina Texeira to require vaccines came down to survival. The pandemic has decimated live music venues, and the thought of closing again was untenable. Gritting out a 15-month closure only to close again would be the death blow to a midtown Sacramento staple that’s almost 90 years old.

“Please understand that if the state shuts down again, we will not survive as a business,” the club said in a recent Facebook post, announcing that it would start requiring its visitors to show proof that they’d been vaccinated.

“It would just be a little bit harder to police people in a nightclub environment with drinking and socializing and dancing,” Texeira told The Bee. “So, to just be extra safe and make it safe for everyone as possible, I just decided it would be safer to require (vaccinations).”

Pandemic uncertainty has spilled back into California just over a month after Gov. Gavin Newsom lifted most COVID restrictions and declared the state was open for business. The delta variant is causing a major uptick in infections, and government officials at every level are scrambling to act after the state spent half the summer with its guard down, mask-free. Sacramento County just required them again for everyone when they’re indoors.

Until this week, the burden mostly fell on business owners like Texeira to make public health decisions because our leaders have feared the blowback from reintroducing restrictions in the disjointed world of COVID recovery.

For better or worse, the delta variant and the danger it poses to the unvaccinated has initiated what we needed all along: The COVID vaccine is finally becoming a requirement.

We’ve witnessed a sea change this week. Newsom ordered state workers and health care employees to get the vaccine or submit to rigorous daily protocols, joining UC and CSU mandates for students and San Francisco’s 35,000 city employees. On Thursday, President Joe Biden issued a similar order for federal employees. Silicon Valley giants like Google and Facebook also took the step.

On Tuesday, Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg called on the city to establish the same get-vaccinated-or-get-tested requirement for each of its nearly 6,000 employees. City Manager Howard Chan said he would convene the city’s unions and try to move quickly on a policy.

“The city should lead the way,” Steinberg said. “If we cannot mandate vaccinations across the city … we can certainly model the kind of action and behavior we know is necessary to put this dreadful period of time and suffering behind us.”

The formula is out there now — require the vaccine or submit to regular testing. It’s time for every employer in Sacramento who cares about their employees (and their bottom line) to do their part to end the pandemic.

For months, getting vaccinated was a personal choice. When demand plateaued in the late spring, campaigns of all varieties offered free booze, fast food and cash lotteries to try to create mass appeal. Only in America do we need our governors to pick powerballs in front of dancing Minions and trolls to convince people to get immunized from a once-in-a-lifetime plague that has killed 611,000 people nationwide.

We tried personal pleas. We tried celebrity pitches and influencers. We’ve tried door-to-door campaigns and community leaders. Still, just half the country is fully-vaccinated. In Sacramento County, it’s a measly 49%, according to the latest figures — although state data shows that the past week has seen the biggest surge in demand in months.

Every company and every employer needs to assert their authority and require the life-saving vaccines that are going unused in our community. If someone is healthy and has no reasonable barrier to getting vaccinated, they need to get the jab or accept the consequences — whether it’s more rigorous daily protocols or finding a new job.

Vaccine resistance isn’t monolithic. Black and Latino communities, for example, have been hurt by the ills of a health care system that has historically limited access and committed horrifying treachery like the Tuskegee experiments. But that’s not an excuse to give up. Statewide, both communities account for over 45% of the eligible population but only 32% of vaccinations. In a post-COVID world, where equity is everyone’s mantra, we have an opportunity to heal those wounds. Pandemic immunity is a great olive branch.

For everyone else, it’s time to get past the skepticism over a vaccine universally supported by doctors, experts and regulators. That should be enough to overcome any armchair reluctance still out there. The Food and Drug Administration will upgrade its emergency use authorization to a full approval in the coming months, and laws will surely follow that require COVID vaccines the same way we do for measles and polio.

We’ve over-complicated the messaging around vaccines to try and “meet people where they are.” I never bought into that. The message needed to be as simple as the life-or-death realities of COVID-19 — get vaccinated and we can end this nightmare. Isn’t that what we all want?

Businesses like the Torch Club have suffered enough. They shouldn’t be the ones leading the way because government and community leaders are too slow to act.