Medical workers protesting…medical precautions.
They were hard to miss on the corner of a busy four-way intersection at the entrance to Winchester Medical Center: a group of about 20 people — many of them nurses, some in scrubs — protesting the hospital’s recent coronavirus vaccination mandate.
Yes, gee, why would a hospital want the staff not to spread a lethal virus?
The nurses’ employer, Valley Health, the parent company of Winchester Medical Center, had given them an ultimatum: Get the shot or face termination. And those standing on the street corner Tuesday had already made up their minds.
Valley Health announced a vaccine mandate for its 6,300 employees at its six locations on July 19, while offering religious and medical exemptions for eligible applicants.
Religious exemptions should be out of the question. That’s a grotesque, insulting reason to allow people to spread a killer virus.
Margaret Foster Riley, a public health sciences and law professor at the University of Virginia, said the unvaccinated health-care workers probably do not have a case that their rights are being violated. The nation has a long history of legal vaccination requirements, especially for health-care workers, she said. What’s different is that entities are requiring shots that are under emergency use authorization and not yet approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
On account of how the virus isn’t going to stand by politely and wait until the FDA approves the shots. It’s just going to go ahead and do what a virus does.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention labeled the vast majority of Virginia counties, including Warren and Frederick, as having “high” virus transmission. For the first time since April, more than 1,000 Virginians are hospitalized with covid-19, and daily new cases are back to February levels.
Inside Winchester Medical Center, other staffers have watched their colleagues’ protestations with unease.
“Being in the health-care profession, it’s bigger than just yourself,” said Sherri Thornton, a nurse in the emergency room. “You’ve dedicated your life and your profession to taking care of people and doing no harm to anyone, and I think you have to protect not only yourself but your patients.”
You’d think.
H/t What a Maroon
Comments
6 responses to “Rebels without a clue”
Do look at the story of Typhoid Mary. In the last few years, she too has been presented as a martyr to ‘freedom.’
She refused to believe in basic hygiene, or that she could infect others without ‘being sick.’ The actual number of her victims is unknown (she was mainly a domestic cook, but did work in a hospital for some time) but more than 50 infections, and at least 3 deaths.
Then again, for her day job, Typhoid Mary might well have been a law professor.
Trouble is, you can be Covid-positive and not know it, and be going around like a perambulating viron sprayer, leaving a whole lot of infected people in your wake.
I am not a lawyer, but I think that when any public bar is in session, most drinkers therein would support an argument at constitutional law that the first duty of a government is to protect the population within its borders.
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/the-law/2021/08/vaccinations-coercion-and-the-rule-of-law/
So…They’re protesting that their employer may fire them for not doing their jobs?
Seems to me that minimizing the risk of your patients aquiring a disease while under your care is (or should be) part of the job of a healthcare worker.
I saw an ad once for a doctor’s job at Australia’s Antarctic base. One of the conditions of employment was stated as “appendectomy essential.” So even if your appendix was perfectly healthy, you had to have it out if you wanted to get the job.
Can’t imagine why.
I read a bit of an Australian novel recently (about a woman – a journalist – who goes to Antarctica) which touched on that. Explanation was that a doctor (also a woman) had to take her own appendix out so let’s not do that again. (Didn’t continue because it got too boring.)
OB: I remember as a teenager reading in the news about a doctor who radioed from a base in Antarctica where he was alone and snowed in that he had come down with what he took to be appendicitis, and if help did not arrive before a particular deadline was going to attempt to take his own appendix out under self-administered local anaestheic . Fortunately, he was rescued. But perhaps that story inspired your novelist.