First of all, who are these anti-vax health care workers? Did they sleep through all their classes? If you can’t do the bare minimum to protect your customers—regardless of the business you’re in—you should change careers, tout de suite.
If a McDonald’s worker refused to wash his hands after using the restroom, I’d expect him to get fired. I wouldn’t much care, of course, because I don’t eat at McDonald’s—though I do occasionally use their bathroom on road trips. The urinal cakes are marginally better than the McMuffins anyway, and they’re free. Or at the very least no one stops you when you walk out of the restaurant with an armload of sopping pink pucks and a feral look on your face.
But for some reason, some health care workers think it’s fine and dandy to spread their freedom phlegm throughout their workplace—a workplace that’s dedicated, at least in part, to stanching the rivers of COVID flowing through our benighted land like jet-black goo on a Giuliani.
Case in point: 153 workers at Houston Methodist Hospital in Texas who refused the COVID vaccine and are now ex-workers at Houston Methodist.
The Washington Post:
The hospital system announced April 1 that staffers would need to be vaccinated to keep their jobs. While 24,947 workers did get vaccinated by earlier deadlines, Houston Methodist suspended 178 workers who had failed to do so on June 7, giving them an additional two weeks to prove they had been immunized. Twenty-five of those employees did get vaccinated, Smith said.
Again, getting vaccinated isn’t necessarily fun, but it’s the bare minimum we can—and must—do as citizens. If you don’t care about spreading lethal diseases to potentially hundreds of other humans, maybe this whole society thing isn’t for you. Find out where Randy Quaid is living now and pitch your yurt next to that.
Earlier this month, a federal district court judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by one of those employees, Jennifer Bridges, a former nurse who alleged the policy was unlawful and forced staffers to be “guinea pigs” for vaccines that had not gone through the full Food and Drug Administration approval process. The FDA has authorized three coronavirus vaccines for emergency use, following rigorous clinical trials involving tens of thousands of people, and both Pfizer and Moderna have applied for full approval for their vaccines.
U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes, the Ronald Reagan appointee who handed down the decision, wrote, “This is not coercion. Methodist is trying to do their business of saving lives without giving them the COVID-19 virus. It is a choice made to keep staff, patients, and their families safer.”
That’s common sense, of course—the equivalent of requiring airline pilots to keep their eyes open when they land planes—but given the dearth of that precious commodity these days, I doubt the outcome was ever a foregone conclusion.
To be fair, I don’t think citizens should be rounded up and forcibly vaccinated, and I don’t know anyone who believes that would be appropriate—even though anti-vax attitudes are literally killing people across this country as we speak. That said, we should use whatever leverage we can to get shots in arms—including preventing dipshit anti-vaxxers from working in health care settings.
Because, seriously … duh.
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