No employees at either Wallowa Valley Senior Living in Enterprise or Alpine House in Joseph were forced to step down from their jobs last week as a result of a state requirement they have COVID-19 vaccines or exemptions.

WALLOWA COUNTY — No employees at two of Wallowa County’s primary senior living facilities had to leave their jobs in late October when the state’s mandate requiring health care workers be vaccinated against COVID-19 or have an approved exemption to the vaccine took effect.

The Oregon Health Authority required that public employees, including health care workers, be fully vaccinated against the virus by Oct. 18 or have medical or religious exemptions to the requirement. Fully vaccinated status is reached two weeks after the final recommended dose of either vaccine.

Employers who did not require this of their employees could be subject to fines.

“Everybody is either following the guidance or following the religious or medical exemptions as laid out by OHA and the state,” said Lisa Hilty, corporate manager at Wallowa Valley Senior Living Center in Enterprise on Monday, Oct. 25.

The center, which has 32 employees, had no violations of the vaccine mandate. Hilty did not know how many — if any — obtained exemptions to the mandate rather than getting vaccinations. But the center has no worries about layoffs, “happily,” she said.

Steve Zollman, administrator at Alpine House in Joseph, said his facility also had to lay no one off. Three of the 23 employees obtained medical exemptions, he said.

“They were for things like if you’d had a kidney transplant, (they were told) don’t take it,” Zollman said Monday.

He said he thought the vaccine mandate was “fairly stupid,” given the environment his workers were in.

“How can you think that someone who’s been working in a COVID situation for the past 14, 15, 16 months would be in more risk?” he said.

But, Zollman said, he believes his employees should be vaccinated.

“People should be more afraid of COVID than the vaccination,” he said.

Wallowa Memorial Hospital and Clinics, meanwhile, did lose five staff members due to the mandates. The rest of the more than 200 staff members either were vaccinated or granted an exemption.

“Wallowa Memorial Hospital and Medical Clinics currently employs 204 individuals. Ninety-eight percent of our workforce is in compliance with the governors mandate for health care workers,” Wallowa Memorial Hospital Communications Director Brooke Pace said. “We are actively filling and recruiting for these five positions and our patients will not be impacted.”

Chieftain editor Ronald Bond contributed to this report.