To Vaccinate or Not---The Rat Flu Odyssey Continues

[riser4]

While I was getting my booster today, crazy old babbling lady was getting her first shot “because of all those horrible vaccine mandates”

Horrible, I tell you, just horrible. Sounds like it's fucking working.

[TNKen]

Daughter is now a working PA in general surgery.

Took her first booster today. Last one of the Pfizer series kicked her ass. We'll see what happens with this one.

[JaytaeMoney]

just didn't read that far, tbh -- i had to go back to see that they are listed in the same sentence, as you note

my "narrative" is that I can't read beyond the paywall
so, how about posting the article?
i'm not allergic to new info

Here's the article:

Some of the largest U.S. hospital systems have dropped Covid-19 vaccine mandates for staff after a federal judge temporarily halted a Biden administration mandate that healthcare workers get the shots.

Hospital operators including HCA Healthcare Inc. HCA 0.43% and Tenet Healthcare Corp. THC 0.79% as well as nonprofits AdventHealth and the Cleveland Clinic are dropping the mandates. Labor costs in the industry have soared, and hospitals struggled to retain enough nurses, technicians and even janitors to handle higher hospitalizations in recent months as the Delta variant raged. Vaccine mandates have been a factor constraining the supply of healthcare workers, according to hospital executives, public-health authorities and nursing groups.

Many hospitals already struggled to find workers, including nurses, before the pandemic. The shortages were compounded by burnout among many medical workers and the lure of high pay rates offered to nurses who travel to hot spots on short-term contracts.

More recently, thousands of nurses have left the industry or lost their jobs rather than get vaccinated. As of September, 30% of workers at more than 2,000 hospitals across the country surveyed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were unvaccinated.

“It’s been a mass exodus, and a lot of people in the healthcare industry are willing to go and shop around,” said Wade Symons, an employee-benefits lawyer and head of consulting firm Mercer’s U.S. regulatory practice. “If you get certain healthcare facilities that don’t require it, those could be a magnet for those people who don’t want the vaccine. They’ll probably have an easier time attracting labor.”

A federal judge in Louisiana ruled in November that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services didn’t have the authority to mandate vaccines for healthcare workers, blocking a Biden administration rule that affected some 10 million workers. The mandate had required all workers at facilities that participate in Medicare and Medicaid to get second shots by Jan. 4. The American Hospital Association estimates that 42% of U.S. hospitals, some 2,640 facilities, have Covid-19 vaccine mandates in place.

“I don’t think the mandates were helpful and I think the court in Louisiana did everyone a service,” said Alan Levine, chief executive officer of Ballad Health, which runs 21 hospitals in Tennessee and Virginia.

Mr. Levine said his company has about 14,000 employees, some 2,000 of whom are unvaccinated or didn’t request an exemption to the requirement. “That many people having to be terminated would have been devastating to our system,” Mr. Levine said.

HCA, among the country’s largest healthcare providers by number of hospitals, said in November that all employees needed to get vaccinated by the Jan. 4 federal deadline. HCA said it suspended its vaccine requirement after courts halted the federal mandate.

“We continue to strongly encourage our colleagues to be vaccinated as a critical step to protect individuals from the virus,” HCA spokesman Harlow Sumerford said. He said a majority of HCA’s roughly 275,000 employees are fully vaccinated.

AdventHealth and Tenet also said they wouldn’t require employees to be vaccinated after the court decision. Workers in states that mandate vaccination must comply with local laws, HCA and Tenet said.

The Cleveland Clinic, which has 19 hospitals in Ohio and Florida and about 65,000 U.S. employees, and Utah hospital giant Intermountain Healthcare also said they would suspend vaccine requirements following the courts’ actions. The Cleveland Clinic said it would add safety measures, such as periodic testing for unvaccinated employees who care for patients. Intermountain said 98% of its workforce had complied with the federal mandate.

Research into vaccine mandates has shown them to be largely effective. Psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania published research in the journal Nature in October showing that vaccine mandates were more likely to prompt workers to get a shot than to discourage them from doing so.

A study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine found that Covid-19 cases and deaths were higher among residents of nursing homes with the lowest rates of staff vaccination. Researchers found that during the summer of 2021, 4,775 Covid-19 cases and 703 nursing-home-resident deaths from the illness could have been prevented if nursing-home staff had higher vaccination rates.

Not all hospital systems have scratched the mandate. Kaiser Permanente, which runs 39 hospitals and hundreds of medical offices in California and other states and employs nearly 210,000 people, said it gave employees until Dec. 1 to get vaccinated. So far, 98% of staff are vaccinated, but on Wednesday the hospital system terminated 352 employees, and another 1,500 face termination in early January unless they become fully vaccinated or receive an exemption, Kaiser said.

Northwell Health, New York state’s largest healthcare provider with 77,000 employees, said its mandate remains in place. In October, Northwell told The Wall Street Journal that 1,400 employees had been terminated for refusing to get vaccinated.

“We will not hire anyone who has not been vaccinated,” a spokesman said.

[summit]

HCA was always antimandate. They only care about profit. They can't staff because they pay shit and treat staff like shit. Fuck that corporation. They can be the employer of choice for antivaxxers and people too complacent to find a decent employer. This is the lowest paying hospital system around and they demand new nurses sign a 3 year employment contract just to get onboarded and have a few residency class days. HCA = Huge py Asshole

[dunfree]

Here's the article:

always like it when they give prominent quotes from long time political types (Alan levine) but don’t tell you they are political types. Such dogshit message laundering, and it’s what so much of the media does these days.

[k2skier112]

First 2 were Pfizer. Just got boosted with Moderna. Waiting a few minutes to see if I go into anaphlactic shock...6 minutes and the ticker is still working

[Ted Striker]

While I was getting my booster today, crazy old babbling lady was getting her first shot “because of all those horrible vaccine mandates”

"What a coincidence! I'm getting my shot to protect all of those horrible old hags like you."

[::: :::]

Here's the article:

thanks!

[The AD]

Remember a while back we were discussing how there are now two separate groups of anti-vaxxers: the old school hippie types, and the new school "mah rights" crowd? I was just looking at King County, Washington's stats and turns out the vaccination rate is very high on Vashon Island, which some assumed would have a fair number of holdouts from the aforementioned hippie group. 92.9% of the total population on Vashon is fully vaxxed and over 95% has at least one dose making it the most highly vaccinated region in the entire county.
https://kingcounty.gov/depts/health/...ccination.aspx

[altasnob]

The hippies have been priced off of Vashon Island. Same with other historical anti-vax areas like Marin County, CA. It's just rich people now and they like their vaccines.

[altasnob]

What we need is a multimillion dollar malpractice judgement against a hospital where someone in there for something else catches covid and was exposed to unvaccinated caregivers.

How would you prove who gave you COVID? And how would you prove it wasn't one of the vaccinated employees who gave it to you?

[MagnificentUnicorn]

HCA was always antimandate. They only care about profit. They can't staff because they pay shit and treat staff like shit. Fuck that corporation. They can be the employer of choice for antivaxxers and people too complacent to find a decent employer. This is the lowest paying hospital system around and they demand new nurses sign a 3 year employment contract just to get onboarded and have a few residency class days. HCA = Huge py Asshole

Bravo!


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[::: :::]

The hippies have aged in place on Vashon Island.

fify

How would you prove who gave you COVID? And how would you prove it wasn't one of the vaccinated employees who gave it to you?

um...contact tracing?

[The AD]

fify

Yes, I'm more inclined to believe your edit. Based on the census data it doesn't seem that the hippies have been priced out to me: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fa...gton/PST045219

[altasnob]

Bottom line, while Vashon Island was historically anti-vax, that was changing even before this pandemic. So you can't make an argument that it was a strong anti-vax community who changed their mind about vaccines due to COVID. I chalk it up to Vashon losing a lot of its "quirkiness" and just becoming another Seattle suburb.

Pre-pandemic 2019: Vaccinations rise on Vashon Island, challenging its reputation as anti-vax ‘poster child’

https://www.seattletimes.com/life/li...-poster-child/

[altasnob]

um...contact tracing?

Proof beyond a preponderance of the evidence; i.e. more likely than not? I've wondered from the beginning of pandemic if we would see law suits claiming someone infected you with COVID. But so far, I haven't heard of any. I don't see how a judge allows a claim to go to the jury. Contract tracing isn't designed to prove definitively where you caught COVID. The margin of error is too great to allow a jury to rely on that evidence to convict someone.

[riser4]

The hippies have been priced off of Vashon Island. Same with other historical anti-vax areas like Marin County, CA. It's just rich people now and they like their vaccines.

I'm descended from hippie adjacent parents, grew up around hippies, love hippies. I've never lived or been priced out of either place. I'm not "rich" and I like vaccines. So nice generalities there.

[Art Shirk]

I live on Vashon. They have their shit dialed out here and most of the nutters are gone. I can drive through the clinic and have results back texted to me in 15 minutes. School protocols are locked tight, contract tracing is huge and their is a ton of transparency with local and school administrations. There are a ton of old people so they ship crates of vax and boosters out here and you can snag one about as easy as hitting the Thriftway for a head of lettuce.

Most of the people who come out here that aren’t residents are just spending time outside so the community is working towards its own micro herd immunity.

There was an small outbreak in the HS this week due to going off island for a wrestling match. They immediately tested the entire school and have those kids in quarantine.


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[Ted Striker]

The hippies traded their flowers for office towers years ago.

[jono]

Proof beyond a preponderance of the evidence; i.e. more likely than not? .... The margin of error is too great to allow a jury to rely on that evidence to convict someone.

Did I hear you worked with legal stuff in some capacity, or was that someone else?

[MagnificentUnicorn]

I live on Vashon. They have their shit dialed out here and most of the nutters are gone. I can drive through the clinic and have results back texted to me in 15 minutes. School protocols are locked tight, contract tracing is huge and their is a ton of transparency with local and school administrations. There are a ton of old people so they ship crates of vax and boosters out here and you can snag one about as easy as hitting the Thriftway for a head of lettuce.

Most of the people who come out here that aren’t residents are just spending time outside so the community is working towards its own micro herd immunity.

There was an small outbreak in the HS this week due to going off island for a wrestling match. They immediately tested the entire school and have those kids in quarantine.


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Sounds like a really nice white enclave.


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[Art Shirk]

Sounds like a really nice white enclave.


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I know the black guy on the island


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[MagnificentUnicorn]

I know the black guy on the island


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I’m pretty sure everyone does


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[altasnob]

Testing indicates that the Omicron variant is surging in Washington State.

Researchers testing coronavirus samples in Washington State have recorded a rapid rise in cases with a mutation that is characteristic of the Omicron variant, mirroring trends that have emerged in countries like South Africa, Britain and Denmark.

Researchers at the University of Washington found that 13 percent of 217 positive coronavirus case specimens collected on Wednesday had the mutation. That was up from about 7 percent of samples they had tested from the day before, and 3 percent from the day before that — in a region that had its first identified cases only two weeks ago.

Washington State may have a clearer window into Omicron’s spread than other parts of the country do, because of research groups in Seattle that have invested in testing and sequencing the virus’s genomic structure. Those researchers helped identify the initial reported outbreak of the coronavirus in the United States early in 2020.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/12...shington-state

[bennymac]

This may have already been posted:

Colorado Dem governor declares COVID-19 emergency ‘over,’ says it’s ‘their own darn fault’ if unvaccinated get sick

https://www.yahoo.com/news/dem-gover...213331865.html

"Those who get sick, it's almost entirely their own darn fault," he continued. "I don't want to say that nobody [will get the virus if they’re] vaccinated, but it's very rare. Just to put it in perspective, of the about 1,400 people hospitalized, less than 200 (or 16%) are vaccinated. And many of them are older or have other conditions. Eighty-four percent of the people in our hospitals are unvaccinated, and they absolutely had every chance to get vaccinated."

"If you haven't been vaccinated, that's your choice. I respect that. But it's your fault when you're in the hospital with COVID," he added.