Maternity ward shuts down because health care workers refuse to get vaccinated

All these people should not only be fired — they should be blacklisted from ever getting another job at a hospital:

A hospital in upstate New York is “pausing” deliveries of babies because of the number of maternity unit employee resignations over the state’s Covid-19 vaccination requirements, health officials say.Lewis County General Hospital in Lowville, about 60 miles northeast of Syracuse, will stop deliveries after September 24, said Gerald Cayer, chief executive of the Lewis County Health System.

“We are unable to safely staff the service after September 24. The number of resignations received leaves us no choice but to pause delivering babies at Lewis County General Hospital. It is my hope that the Department of Health will work with us in support of pausing the service rather than closing the maternity department,” Cayer said at a news conference Friday.

Since former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced all hospital and long-term care facility employees must have at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine by September 27, 30 hospital system employees — 21 of whom were working in clinical areas — have resigned, Cayer said.

Six of the resignations were in the hospital’s maternity unit.

Cayer said there are 165 employees throughout the Lewis County Health System who haven’t received a single dose of the vaccine.

“Our vaccine vaccination rate is now 73% — 464 individuals in the health system are now vaccinated,” Cayer said. “165 employees are not yet vaccinated. And it is not clear what they will do,” Cayer said.

The striking thing about all this is that until 15 minutes ago vaccine mandates of all kinds were completely uncontroversial as a matter of mainstream politics in the United States. Anti-vaxx ideology was a fringe position that no respectable [sic] Republican backed.

I assume that one consequence of all this madness is that vaccine resistance in general will now get mainstreamed, because it’s been discovered that negative consequences of any kind for refusing to behave responsibly in regard to the social obligation to get yourself and your children vaccinated is an attack on Freedom ™.

BTW a couple of days after I fired my longtime dentist because he refuses to get vaccinated, I discovered that somebody DirecTV had sent out to my house wasn’t vaccinated either. On top of that he wasn’t even wearing an actual mask of any kind — just a scarf over his nose and mouth that made him look like a leftist guerrilla in some 1970s cinematic extravaganza that was made with the help of copious amounts of cocaine. (I realize this doesn’t narrow it down that much).

I’m sorry to say that since this job had already been rescheduled twice, I decided to leave the house for two hours instead of rescheduling yet again, or better yet just terminating my contract with a national company that is apparently A-OK with sending unvaccinated personnel into peoples’ houses. (I have principles but there was a Michigan football game on this weekend so . . .).

Then yesterday I was hanging out with a doctor friend who works in the ER of one of the state’s biggest hospitals, and he was expressing his frustration at how they are just slammed now with COVID cases, and how this is interfering with being able to perform their normal work. I really can’t imagine how people in his position handle that psychologically.