President Joe Biden on Wednesday afternoon announced a new policy that would require nursing home staff to be vaccinated against COVID-19 as a condition for those facilities to receive funding for Medicare and Medicaid.

The plan will affect 15,000 nursing homes that employ up to 1.3 million people and could go into effect by September. Biden has also mandated federal employees receive vaccines as he seeks to vaccinate as many Americans as possible. He has also encouraged states to incentivize the vaccine by giving their residents $100 each through the emergency recovery plan.

“If you visit, live, or work in a nursing home, you should not be at a high risk for contracting COVID from unvaccinated employees,” Biden said in a White House address.

About 60% of nursing home staff have been fully vaccinated, according to data by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Biden has already required all healthcare and nursing home workers employed by the Veterans Affairs Administration to be vaccinated.

More than 200 million Americans have received at least one dose of the vaccine with 80 million eligible still not vaccinated.

“As we see the spread of the Delta and the rest of the COVID cases, it is really especially important that we ensure that those caring for our most vulnerable are vaccinated,” said Carole Johnson, a senior official on the White House Covid-19 response team.

In seven states in which less than half of the nursing home staff is vaccinated, weekly cases were 7.9 times higher in the week ending on Aug. 3 than they were for the week ending on June 27.

Meanwhile, states with more than 60% vaccinated cases reported on the week ending on Aug. 1 were only three times higher than cases reported in the final week of June.

Coronavirus