photo by: Screenshot/KU Health System

University of Kansas Chancellor Douglas Girod speaks during a KU Health System webcast Tuesday, May 26, 2020.

KU and two other state universities are contemplating when to start firing employees who don’t meet a new federal vaccination mandate, but efforts aren’t underway for schools to evade the COVID requirement.

Members of the Kansas Board of Regents on Thursday were told that no new information has been found that suggests KU, Kansas State and Wichita State can opt out of the mandate without risking the loss of federal contracts that provide millions of dollars and thousands of jobs in the state.

University of Kansas Chancellor Douglas Girod told Regents that $170 million to $180 million in federal contracts would be at risk and that those contracts directly amount to about 2,000 jobs or more. At Wichita State, the numbers are about $80 million and 1,400 jobs.

“It would be pretty consequential,” Wichita State President Richard Muma said of evading the mandate.

That leaves KU and other schools wondering how many employees they may lose as a result of not becoming vaccinated or failing to qualify for an exemption. Girod said KU doesn’t yet have an estimate for how many that may be at KU.

Girod said that before the mandate, KU believed 70-some percent of KU employees had been vaccinated against COVID, but the university did not have hard numbers because state policy prohibited KU from asking employees.

“We know it has gone up since then, and I think the Delta variant quite honestly drove a lot of that,” Girod told the Journal-World in a brief interview. “But I don’t think we know whether we are up by 10% or 15%. We’ll find out as we go along.”

A couple of key dates are looming for KU and employees who are not vaccinated. Employees have until Dec. 8 to file for one of two exemptions — a medical exemption or a religious exemption — that would allow them to not receive a vaccine and keep their jobs at KU.

The second date generally is Jan. 18. That’s the date the Biden Administration has said federal contractors — of which KU is a major one due to many research grants — must have all their employees fully vaccinated. However, Girod indicated that KU believes it may have the ability to keep some people on the payroll if they have agreed to become vaccinated but haven’t yet completed all their doses by the federal deadline.

Girod said once the Dec. 8 deadline for exemption requests passes, KU will have a committee of administrators and medical professionals begin reviewing the exemption requests. For those employees that don’t receive an exemption, KU will offer educational material to the employees about the benefits of vaccination.

“If they are willing to comply and that goes beyond the January deadline, we will work with them to figure out how to do that,” Girod said. “We’re trying to be as flexible as we can be.”

Other universities are setting harder deadlines. At Kansas State, its deadline for exemption requests was earlier this week, and KSU President Richard Myers said the university would have an internal list by Dec. 1 of all employees who aren’t vaccinated. Outreach efforts will begin to provide vaccine education to those employees willing to receive it. But if employees aren’t fully vaccinated by the January deadline they will be terminated.

“We’re going to get on with business because we have to start hiring,” Myers said. “We have a semester starting, and if they are going to leave, we need to know that.”

Unlike other vaccine mandates that have been proposed, this one for federal contractors does not give employees the option of regular testing in lieu of vaccination.

Currently, the state’s other Regents universities — Emporia State, Fort Hays State and Pittsburg State — haven’t implemented the mandate because they don’t have federal contracts that trigger the vaccination requirement.

Regents, however, were told the vaccine mandate is a bit of a “moving target,” and new information could change that status. Girod also said KU was facing challenges keeping up with the federal information, or lack of information.

“Manpower to manage the process is the major challenge,” Girod said. “When you are talking about 9,000 employees to try and have to do an individual touch for big chunks of them, there is just bandwidth issues. People already have day jobs so they are just trying to do this on top of that. Our teams are working really hard to figure out how to do it and recognize and value our employees in the process.”

Girod said KU also hasn’t been given much guidance on what the federal government’s expectations are for reasons that an employee could be granted an exemption. The most recent guidance from federal officials states every employee must be vaccinated “except in limited circumstances where an employee is legally entitled to an accommodation.”

“It could change tomorrow, but there is not a lot of guidance right now, so we are doing the best we can,” Girod said.

KU has two applications for requests for exemptions from the mandate — one for medical reasons and one for religious reasons. Both forms can be found on the protect.ku.edu website. The medical exemption form asks about allergic reactions the person has had to vaccines in the past, the type of reaction and specific information about which ingredient in a vaccine has been known to cause an adverse reaction for the applicant. The application states “a general history of vaccine side effects or general avoidance of vaccines” is not an approved reason for a medical exemption.

The application for a religious exemption asks applicants to write a description of their sincerely held religious beliefs regarding vaccines. The application also encourages applicants to provide any past documentation related to their religious beliefs regarding vaccines, including written statements from third parties such as “religious leaders, practitioners, or others with whom you have discussed your belief.”

The application states a religious exemption won’t be granted based on “personal preference, concerns about the possible effects of the vaccine, or political opinions.”