Major hospitals across the country have been compelled to drop their vaccine requirements after the mandates led to massive worker shortages, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Prominent hospital systems such as AdventHealth, HCA Healthcare Inc., and Tenet Healthcare Corp. have dropped their COVID-19 vaccine mandates for staff, stating the mandates have been a factor affecting their workplace shortages, WSJ reported.
“Vaccine mandates have been a factor constraining the supply of healthcare workers, according to hospital executives, public-health authorities and nursing groups,” the WSJ wrote, adding, “thousands of nurses have left the industry or lost their jobs rather than get vaccinated” for COVID-19.
Townhall also reported that University Hospitals in Cleveland have also recently reversed their vaccine mandate for hospital workers.
“University Hospitals has been moving to implement the COVID-19 vaccine mandate required by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). In light of the federal court injunction issued November 30 that temporarily blocks CMS from enforcing the mandate, come Jan. 4, unless there is further legal action, caregivers may continue to provide patient care services regardless of their vaccination status,” UH said in a statement.
The Cleveland Clinic has also announced it would allow unvaccinated employees to work.
“In light of these developments, we are pausing the implementation of our COVID-19 vaccine policy, which required all employees and those who provide services with us to either receive the COVID-19 vaccine or an approved exemption with accommodations,” the clinic said. “However, to further strengthen our protection of employees and patients, we will put in place additional safety requirements for employees who are unvaccinated, including periodic testing for those providing direct clinical care.”
Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reveals unvaccinated employees account for 30 percent of workers employed by more than 2,000 U.S. hospitals.
The hospital systems were given a reprieve when a federal judge in Louisiana temporarily halted the Biden administration’s mandate for healthcare workers last month.
“There is no question that mandating a vaccine to 10.3 million health care workers is something that should be done by Congress, not a government agency,” Judge Terry A. Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, wrote. He added, “It is not clear that even an act of Congress mandating a vaccine would be constitutional.”
Alan Levin, chief executive officer of Ballad Health, told the WSJ the judge’s order did hospitals a favor.
“I don’t think the mandates were helpful and I think the court in Louisiana did everyone a service,” Levine said, noting his company alone employed 2,000 people who opted not to get the vaccine. Letting that many people go “would have been devastating to our system,” he asserted.
Following Judge Doughty’s ruling, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced it will halt enforcement of the healthcare worker mandate pending appeal.
According to Wade Symons, an employee-benefits lawyer who heads the consulting firm Mercer’s U.S. regulatory practice, hospitals that have dropped the vaccine requirement are likely to see an influx of applicants who are leaving hospitals that maintain the mandates.
“It’s been a mass exodus, and a lot of people in the healthcare industry are willing to go and shop around,” he said. “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.”
Opposition to the mandates remains strong as increasing evidence underscores the effectiveness of natural COVID-19 immunity compared to “immunity” achieved through vaccinations.
“If you had COVID before and recovered, all the data that we’re looking at will suggest that you have bulletproof natural immunity, which is much more robust and comprehensive than vaccine immunity,” Dr. Paul Alexander, an epidemiologist with the Early COVID Care Experts who has compiled 141 studies on natural immunity — including a major study from Israel published in August — told The Epoch Times.
The Israeli study found natural immunity to be 13 times more effective than vaccines in protecting individuals.
“The increased risk was significant for symptomatic disease as well,” states the Israeli report. Vaccinated individuals had “a 5.96-fold increased risk for breakthrough infection and a 7.13-fold increased risk for symptomatic disease.” There was also a greater risk for COVID-19-related hospitalizations compared to those that were previously infected.
“This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity,” the authors wrote.
According to The Epoch Times, Dr. Hooman Noorchashm, a physician-scientist and an advocate for ethics, patient safety, and women’s health, has been an outspoken critic of administering vaccines to individuals who have achieved natural immunity.
“Indiscriminately vaccinating persons with recent COVID-19 infections poses a risk of clinical harm to recently infected persons. There have been some very prominent young deaths following vaccination — and it is becoming clear that adverse event [reaction] rates are higher in the previously infected,” Noorchashm said.
And despite the mainstream media’s efforts to treat mass vaccination requirements as a fully supported protocol amongst scientists, medical experts across the world have spoken out against vaccine mandates, including the renowned World Health Organization.
“Mandates around vaccination are an absolute last resort and only applicable when all feasible options to improve vaccination uptake have been exhausted,” WHO Europe director Hans Kluge told a press briefing just last week.
Dr. Matthew Memoli, a 16-year unvaccinated veteran at the National Institute of Health and top infectious disease doctor, called vaccine mandates “extraordinarily problematic.” Instead, Memoli contends the vaccines should be reserved for the most vulnerable, such as obese and elderly individuals.
Memoli, who recently received a 2021 NIH director’s award for his supervision of a national study into undiagnosed COVID-19 cases early in the pandemic, told the Wall Street Journal, “I do vaccine trials. I, in fact, help create vaccines. Part of my career is to share my expert opinions, right or wrong…. I mean, if they all end up saying I’m wrong, that’s fine. I want to have the discussion.”
David Wendler — a senior NIH bioethicist in charge of planning the session — told the Journal, “There’s a lot of debate within the NIH about whether [a vaccine mandate] is appropriate. It’s an important, hot topic.”
Critics of vaccine mandates also cite COVID-19’s high survivability rate and more than 12,000 deaths related to the vaccine reported by the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), though the CDC’s website modified those numbers on July 21 from 12,313 to 6,207, according to Precision Vaccinations. Data from VAERS, processed as of December 3, shows nearly 700,000 adverse events related to the COVID vaccines.
