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Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg said that the federal government should "encourage" private businesses to implement vaccine passports when he was asked this week about Texas's ban on the practice. "If a company, a business wants to take steps to keep their workers and their passengers safe, I would think that, from a government perspective, we want to do everything we can to encourage that," Buttigieg told KDFW FOX 4 in Dallas on Monday. "And that’s certainly our view at the federal level." (Best, 6/23)

A tech company is announcing a new health app Thursday that it says will help employers bring their employees back to the office safely by verifying their COVID-19 vaccination status. The app, or others like it, could be a sign of how employers can enforce vaccination requirements without relying on the honor system or hand-checking CDC vaccine cards. (Owens, 6/24)

San Francisco will require all 35,000 city employees to be vaccinated against the coronavirus once a vaccine receives full approval from the Food and Drug Administration, city officials said Wednesday. The new policy makes San Francisco the first city or county in California — and probably the U.S. — to mandate COVID vaccinations for all government employees. (Allday, 6/23)

At least a couple of private West Virginia schools are requiring students to be vaccinated against COVID-19 this fall. The University of Charleston and Bethany College both say vaccinations will be required for the upcoming school year. University of Charleston President Marty Roth told news outlets that it is the school’s responsibility to provide a healthy environment for the 1,500 students expected at the Charleston campus and 200 at the Beckley campus. The way to do that is to require students to be vaccinated, he said. (6/24)

Indiana University, a flagship institution in a staunchly Republican state, will require its more than 100,000 students and employees to get vaccinated against the novel coronavirus as it turns the page on a strange pandemic school year. “This is saving lives, it’s as simple as that,” said university President Michael A. McRobbie. “And it will enable us to have a normal fall semester.” Purdue University, also prominent in Indiana, is strongly encouraging vaccination for students and employees but avoiding mandates. A campaign for personal choice and responsibility, Purdue President Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. said, will get better public health results than requirements that “might come across as ham-handed and dictatorial.” (Anderson, Svrluga, Stanley-Becker, Lumpkin and Aguilar, 6/23)

A day after Houston Methodist finalized the terminations and resignations of 153 workers who had refused the COVID-19 vaccine, opinions swirled across one of Houston's largest hospital systems: "Dramatic." "Good patient care." "It's their choice." Although some patients and workers thought the first-in-the-nation firings went too far, they also felt safer going to the hospital knowing that their doctors and nurses were inoculated against the virus. Alex Chamorro, director of Houston Methodist’s central business office, was fully vaccinated by mid-January, a choice she made after she was hospitalized for COVID-19 last summer and lost her husband to the infection. (Wu and Zong, 6/23)

Several hospitals in central and western Maine are seeing staff vaccination rates lower than the corresponding rate for the adult population here, opening them to a higher risk of outbreaks and reflecting the challenges of vaccine hesitancy. The hospitals with fewer staff vaccinated are largely in regions of the state with lower overall vaccination rates. Seven hospitals spread across Oxford, Somerset, Kennebec, Androscoggin, Franklin and Piscataquis counties saw less than 65 percent of employees fully vaccinated as of the end of May. At the time, just more than 65 percent of Maine adults were fully vaccinated. (Piper, 6/24)