WASHINGTON (Reuters)

United States (US) President Joe Biden will require all federal employees to get vaccinated against COVID-19 and the U.S. Department of Labor will issue a rule requiring businesses with more than 100 employees to have their workers vaccinated or tested weekly, officials said on Thursday (September 9).

The new measures, which Biden was due to lay out in remarks at 5 p.m. ET (2100 GMT), cover about two-thirds of all US employees, part of a broader, more aggressive attempt to get Americans vaccinated amid a surge in COVID-19 cases from the fast-spreading Delta variant.

Under Biden’s plan, the administration would also require vaccinations for more than 17 million healthcare workers at hospitals and other institutions that participate in Medicare and Medicaid social programmes for poor, disabled and older Americans, senior administration officials said.

The new vaccination requirements cover about 100 million workers, or about two-thirds of all workers in the United States, officials said. In addition, the administration plans to ramp up testing capacity for the virus.

Biden will use his authority under the Defense Production Act to spur industry to accelerate production of the tests, and big retailers including Walmart, Amazon.com and Kroger will sell the tests at cost for the next three months to make them more affordable, the officials said.

The full recovery of the US economy depends on blunting the spread of the virus, which is a key health and political goal of the president, a Democrat who took entered the White House in January.

“Our overarching objective here is to reduce the number of unvaccinated Americans,” White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said, noting that 80 million still have not been vaccinated. “We want to reduce that number, decrease hospitalisations and deaths and allow our children to go to school safely.”