COVID-19 vaccine
COVID-19 vaccineiStock

Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson on Sunday defended employers mandating that employees get a COVID-19 vaccine, though he said he opposed such mandates by the federal and state governments, The Hill reports.

“The states are sometimes coming in and saying, ‘Employers should not have the ability to impose a vaccine requirement on their workers.’ To me, that's the wrong direction as well. It's not practical in terms of creating that debate, but it's not principled either,” Hutchinson was quoted as having said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press”.

“I am a defender of the employer's right to provide a healthy workplace. You would have just as many workers say, ‘I don't want to work there because it's not a healthy workplace, because not everybody's going to be vaccinated.’ The employers are in a tough position. They would have the prerogative to make those decisions and I support that,” Hutchinson added.

The Governor noted, however, that he did not believe that governments at the federal and state level should be involved in making the request for individuals to get vaccinated.

“Let me make it clear that when I say I don't believe we ought to be engaging in mandates, I'm speaking of the government mandates, whether it's a federal government mandate or a state government mandate,” Hutchinson said.

President Joe Biden last month mandated private companies with at least 100 workers to require their employees to get a COVID-19 vaccine or undergo weekly testing.

Last week, Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued an executive order prohibiting entities from enforcing a vaccinate mandate in response to what he called "bullying" by the Biden Administration.

Biden’s chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci on Sunday called Abbott’s ban “unfortunate".

"We know how effective vaccines are in preventing not only illness for the individual, but for the diminishing the dynamics of the infection in society," he added.