The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has touched almost everyone in America but our health care workers have arguably suffered the most. They have braved the front lines of this pandemic for almost two years with little regard to their own health.
Jacqueline Colbert is a hospital chaplain at Virginia’s Sentara Leigh Hospital who is tasked with leading prayer sessions for workers there. “COVID really took a toll on the staff here at the hospital,” she explained. “Exhaustion, being overwhelmed and not sure how to navigate the fears of catching the disease and taking it home to family and loved ones but still having the heart to do what they’ve been drawn to… to provide the care that others need.”
Many health care workers say the most trying task is serving as the go-between for the patient and family members who are not allowed in the hospital because of COVID-19 protocols. Loretta Scott, a nursing care partner said she relies on her faith to fill that gap. Scott says she has leaned on the Lord for strength to meet the needs of her patients. “I often work extra hours because I care about my patients,” she said. “So it was nonstop for me. So my family was worried and said, ‘You need to rest,’ but I said, ‘I must go on.’ And I can truly say that the Lord has kept my health. He has kept me.”
Stories like this are common across the country. But now these heroic workers face a new threat and it is one caused by a man, not a virus. Vaccine mandates ordered by President Biden have lead to mass firings and caused many others to quit their jobs. These mandates have affected the very people who have put their lives on the line for us since the pandemic started.
Novant Health in North Carolina has fired 175 people who were not vaccinated. The Winston-Salem-based health system recently announced 375 more employees had been suspended and given five days to comply with the mandate. In Kentucky, Med Center Health in Bowling Green fired 180 employees who did not take the vaccine. In Biden’s home state of Delaware, ChristianaCare fired 150 employees who could not agree to its vaccine mandate. And the list goes on and on.
Houston nurse Jennifer Bridges, was fired for not getting a mandated COVID-19 vaccine, despite being a ”hero” last year, working in the COVID unit of her hospital. ”I didn’t feel that there had been proper, adequate research done, and the adverse reactions I was seeing myself in the hospital were too scary. I was not willing to take it. So I lost my job, and I lost my whole livelihood just over the fact I wasn’t comfortable with it,” she said.
Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate, however well-intentioned it may be, threatens to create even more suffering and misery in what has already been a very tough year. Not only have healthcare workers been under assault, police, firefighters and other first responders have been forced out of their jobs. Even the brave men and women who serve our country in the armed services have been affected.
State attorneys general across America have joined together to fight Biden’s mandate and now twelve states have filed a lawsuit to block it. “The Vaccine Mandate causes grave danger to vulnerable persons whom Medicare and Medicaid were designed to protect- the poor, sick and elderly- by forcing the termination of ‘healthcare heroes,’” the lawsuit reads.
Dr. Jaroslav Flidr is a physicist and cyber security expert who was fired by George Washington University for refusing to be vaccinated. Flidr grew up in communist Czechoslovakia and was a student leader during Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution. He says the vaccine mandate is the sort of thing a communist government would do.
“This is exactly what the communists did in the olden days. And so, when I saw (the school’s demand to be vaccinated), I was quite surprised, and I thought, ‘No way, absolutely no way I would actually comply with this.’ Based on his experience under communism, Flidr believes that when citizens submit to government orders like the vaccine mandate, it only encourages governments to do it again. Flidr said, “For me, there was this message, you know, ‘We own you and we will make you do whatever we want.’”
I am not an anti-vaxxer and I have been fully vaccinated. But what I will never understand is the threatening, vindictive, heavy-handed bullying in conjunction with the mandates. Not only are these unfair and even cruel, but they give fuel to the fire of those who view the mandates as nothing less than dangerous governmental overreach. In the end, they will do more harm than good, hurting lives more than saving lives while increasing our general mistrust of those in authority.
According to research from the CDC nearly one -third of healthcare workers are still not vaccinated. So what are we going to do when a third of our hospital workers are suddenly terminated right in the middle of a pandemic? Someday soon, you may go to the emergency room and find yourself waiting for hours upon hours because there is nobody to treat you. This is America! This sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen here!
Last year the White House celebrated doctors and nurses as heroes. Sadly, last year’s heroes are now becom