BY MAIRE O’NEILL
maire@losalamosreporter.com

Los Alamos County Manager Steven Lynne said at Tuesday’s County Council meeting that Los Alamos National Laboratory’s announcement that it is going to require contractors to be vaccinated in order to be onsite has prompted some serious discussion on the County’s part.

“I wanted to share with Council that at this point we haven’t finalized anything but given the need for employee safety, for customer safety, and sort of this trigger of the discussion with providing service across the bridge, we were having some very serious discussions about converting our testing requirement into a vaccine requirement,” Lynne said. “I wanted to mention it tonight because it’s something that may need to take place before the next Council meeting, so we’re still exploring  policy options and discussing this so I wanted to mention that here tonight.”

Councilors did not have any questions or responses to Lynne’s comments.

Lynne earlier reported that this is the second week that the County has had its COVID testing requirement in place for employees and said he was very pleased with the improvement in compliance over the prior week. He reported that the number of employees opting out of testing by providing their vaccination information had risen from 439 to 497 or 71 percent of employees.

Emergency Manager Beverley Simpson, calling in from Louisiana where she is currently part of a state team assisting with the response to Hurricane Ida, noted that she is working with the New Mexico Department of Health, FEMA and Dr. (Robert) McClees, owner of Trinity Urgent Care, to set up some vaccination clinics for boosters based on the shot clinics during the past year. She said the Los Alamos High School Auxiliary Gym has been reserved for Sundays to accommodate nine booster clinics. The number of clinics is based on some 7,000 boosters which will be needed of everyone who received the first two doses decides to take the booster.