Westmoreland Co. lawmaker offers to help with vaccine exemptions as covid-19 infections surge

A state lawmaker is offering “vaccination exemption assistance,” while local health officials plead with residents to mask up and get vaccinated and Excela Health struggles to deal with covid-19 infections that have pushed its three Westmoreland County hospitals beyond capacity.

State Rep. Leslie Rossi, R-Unity, said she offered help to those seeking vaccination exemptions in response to growing inquiries from fearful constituents in her district, which includes portions of eastern Westmoreland and western Somerset counties.

Her newsletter landed in local mailboxes as Westmoreland County emergency management officials warned of a “desperate” situation in local hospitals, where covid-19 infections have surged among unvaccinated residents, sparking overcrowding in emergency rooms and a scarcity of beds in inpatient and intensive care units.

Dr. Carol Fox, chief medical officer of Excela Health, echoed those comments, imploring residents to wear masks and get vaccinated.

“It is important to do all that can be done to prevent individuals from contracting covid-19,” Fox said Tuesday, on a day when the death toll among Westmoreland County residents spiked to 11, the highest single-day death toll reported since January.

The most recent covid-19 report from the Pennsylvania Department of Health pegged deaths among Westmoreland County residents at 1,027 since March 2020, when the pandemic arrived.

Excela’s weekly report for Dec. 2 underscored the health threats unvaccinated individuals face. That week, the hospital system reported 88 individuals hospitalized at Excela hospitals in Greensburg, Latrobe and Mt. Pleasant. Only nine of those individuals were fully vaccinated, and not one of the 13 individuals on ventilators was fully vaccinated.

Rossi generated international headlines when she created the Trump House, an old frame house near Latrobe painted red, white and blue and featuring a 12-foot cutout of Donald Trump in the yard, in 2016. She reopened the house last year, drawing Trump supporters from near and far during the 2020 campaign. In May, she won a special election to fill a vacancy in the General Assembly.

She said she is not opposed to vaccination but she has heard many complaints from constituents who are not vaccinated facing what they view as workplace discrimination.

Thousands of vaccine-eligible residents in Westmoreland and Somerset counties have yet to be fully vaccinated. State reports showed 55.6% of Westmoreland residents are fully vaccinated, while only 46% were fully vaccinated in Somerset County.

Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration was distributing grants to encourage vaccination as Rossi’s newsletter hit the mail. A banner in bold letters promotes Rossi’s district office services, reading, “Covid-19 vaccination exemption assistance now available.” She went on to offer constituents assistance in obtaining vaccine exemption forms and offered to notarize them at no cost.

Republican lawmakers repeatedly have been at odds with Wolf, a Democrat, who invoked a strict pandemic shutdown when the virus surfaced last year. Earlier this week, when the state Senate passed a measure aimed at prohibiting school vaccine mandates, Wolf — who has said he has no intention of issuing a mandate — said he would veto any such measure.

Recently, families opposed to the administration’s mask mandates in public schools scored a victory in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court when the justices ruled the administration had overstepped its authority with the mandate.

Vaccine exemption requests were an issue for weeks this fall, when President Biden’s administration issued an order requiring businesses with more than 100 workers to require vaccinations for all employees by Dec. 8 unless they had medical or religious exemptions. A federal court since then has stayed that order. But an administration order requiring health care workers to be vaccinated remains in flux in the courts.

Rossi said the administration’s original order sparked fear and anxiety for some who were opposed to the mandate, including health care workers who worked through the pandemic and were fearful that they could now lose their jobs for failing to comply.

“My office has assisted too many to count by notarizing constituents’ exemption forms … that will stand up in court,” she wrote in an email. “We are not approving or disapproving of their choice, we are merely notarizing that their signature is the person before us signing the document that they turn in to that person’s said employer.”

She said her office has logged complaints from constituents who say employers were requiring pastors to sign forms seeking religious exemptions and that others were withholding bonuses to those who had not been vaccinated.

“No one — not their employer and especially the government — has any right to try and force any individual to get vaccinated, and yet that is what we are seeing happen. Health care workers stood by their patients and worked through the pandemic and now those very people are being threatened or discriminated against if they have chosen not to be vaccinated,” she wrote in response to questions about her newsletter.