Your quote contains of my quote that they had Covid already....
I overlooked that part; my bad.
I still think their alleged willingness to throw away their livelihood is incredibly foolish.
I know you have taken diligent precautions from the get-go (N95 or N100 mask wearing, as an example), and that is certainly appreciated.
Please realize many (not all) of the anti-COVID vaccine folks have taken few or zero precautions during the entire pandemic and that many (not all) feel COVID is "fake" or "not nearly as bad" as portrayed.
One distant relative and a good friend of my father's have both died from COVID as a result of that attitude.
I work as a nurse at a large, nationally-recognized hospital. I’m fully vaccinated, as are about 80 percent of my colleagues at the system I work for. I will encourage people to get the vaccine, but there’s still 20 percent that won’t get it. Almost every single bed at my hospital is full and we already don’t have enough staff to provide SAFE care half the time. If my hospital just loses a few nurses because of this policy, our staffing would be royally fucked, which would lead to worse care for everyone. Do I agree that healthcare workers who decline the vaccine are irresponsible? For the most part, yes. However, regardless of their consequences for leaving, it still leaves the rest of us in a very bad spot.
First - hats off to you and your colleagues for the PHENOMENAL work and sacrifices you have made since the start of the pandemic!
You raise a valid point regarding staffing concerns, since your profession is one where mandatory vaccination would indeed be required, and there isn't exactly a bunch of ready-to-hire labor waiting in the wings.
Many hospital systems already do require, or were scheduled to soon begin requiring, mandatory vaccination irrespective of the proposed OSHA rule, so it is difficult to say how much incremental impact the OSHA rule will have if it indeed moves ahead.
Since those coming to the hospital for COVID treatment are already infected, the vaccination status of health care professionals is irrelevant, one would think.
In terms of risk of non-COVID patients contracting COVID from a medical professional as a result of a visit, that risk shouldn't be very high if the non-COVID patient has either (a) received the vaccine or (b) developed natural immunity. Of course, risk is lowest if BOTH individuals are vaccinated.
The greater risk would be from improper sanitization, it would seem to me.
Mandatory vaccination for health care workers is one element of the proposed rule that I would be OK dropping (subject to appropriate testing protocol). As I wrote in one of my posts in the other thread, I also suspect that is the element of the proposed rule most likely to be overturned judicially.