NY Hospital Closes Maternity Ward As Healthcare Workers Resign Over Vaccine Mandates

By Arjun Walia | The Pulse

Lewis County General Hospital in Lowville, New York has announced that it will stop delivering babies after September 24th due to the fact that too many maternity unit workers have resigned over COVID vaccine mandates.

As of now, 6 employees in the maternity unit have resigned instead of getting their shot, and another 7 are currently undecided, according to Lewis County Health System Chief Executive Officer Gerald Cayer.

Cayer also said that 165 hospital employees have yet to be vaccinated, representing 27% of the hospitals workforce. The other 464 workers have had their shots.

For now, the hospital will be unable to staff the maternity unit and will keep delivering babies up until September 24th, but none after that until the staffing shortage can be resolved.

In August, the state announced that all healthcare workers at hospitals and long-term care facilities across New York would be required to have at least their first dose of a COVID-19 vaccination by September 27th.

Cayer said the announcement prompted 30 workers to get vaccinated, while another 30 resigned.

“Our hope is as we get closer (to the deadline), the numbers will increase of individuals who are vaccinated, fewer individuals will leave and maybe, with a little luck, some of those who have resigned will reconsider…We are not alone. There are thousands of positions that are open north of the Thruway and now we have a challenge to work through, you know, with the vaccination mandate.” – WWNYTV

An Issue Before Mandates?

It’s hard to know just how many healthcare workers are opposed to vaccine mandates. News of healthcare workers refusing to take the vaccine and who oppose mandates will seldom come from mainstream media. Given mainstream media is a major source of information for a lot of people, if networks like CNN, MSNBC, ABC, or CBC don’t cover these stories repetitively like they do others, they become completely off the radar.

The impact this has is simple: people assume that ‘anti-vaxxers’ are uneducated people who are likely conspiracy theorists, as opposed to intelligent people like doctors, nurses, scientists, and other healthcare workers.

This has been a common theme throughout the pandemic. Credible information, science and evidence that opposes the government narrative and measures has been ignored or ridiculed. Furthermore, social media outlets have removed and/or put warning labels on hundreds of millions of pieces of content.

Vaccine hesitancy was observed among healthcare workers prior to the announcement of mandates. In January for example, Dr. Nikhila Juvvadi, the chief clinical officer at Chicago’s Loretto Hospital, said that a survey was administered there to healthcare workers in December regarding who would get the COVID-19 vaccine and who wouldn’t. The survey found that 40% of the hospital staff said they would not get vaccinated and 60% said they would.

Riverside County, California has a population of approximately 2.4 million, and about 50% of healthcare workers in the county were refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccine despite the fact that they had top priority and access to it.

At Providence Holy Cross Medical Centre in Mission Hills, one in five frontline nurses and doctors have declined the shot. Roughly 20% to 40% of L.A. County’s frontline workers who were offered the vaccine did the same, according to county public health officials. This news emerged in January, but with mandates things may have changed as some of these people may have shifted their decision to keep their job.

There are also organizations like The Great Barrington Declaration, and the Canadian COVID Care Alliance that represent thousands of doctors, scientists and other academics who are also opposed to vaccine mandates. These organizations advocate for a more focused protection plan, one that protects those who are at risk and vulnerable from a COVID infection.

Still, most people are unaware of these organizations and their professional perspectives due to the fact that they get no mainstream media coverage.

Why Are People Opposing Mandates?

There are a number of reasons that mandates are being opposed. One of them is the survival rate of the virus. According to a recent paper, that’s still in pre-print (not yet been peer-reviewed) the survival rate for people (without underlying health issues) between the ages of 0 and 19 is 99.997%. For people 20-29 it’ 99.986%, 40-49 it’s 99.92%, for 50-59 it’s 99.73 % and for people 60-69 it’s 99.4%. For those above the age of 70 it’s estimated to be 94.5%.

Another reason would be the power of natural immunity, something that’s been commonly ignored throughout the pandemic, even though now it’s beginning to change. It’s unclear why sentiment is suddenly shifting, perhaps it’s the waning vaccine reality. Regardless, there has been a plethora of science published showing the strength of natural immunity early on. It remains odd how natural immunity and prior infection has not been included in vaccine passport options around the world.

People are also concerned about vaccine injuries. There are a number of injuries that are being reported to vaccine adverse event reporting systems across the globe. Despite the fact that not all injuries reported to these systems can be confirmed to be a result of the vaccine, it is still having an impact on public sentiment. There are many concerning examples of COVID vaccine injuries, like this one, and many believe that are more common than mainstream media is letting on.

Furthermore, we still have a lot to learn about the transmission of the virus. A systematic review and meta-analysis is one of multiple studies to show that transmission risk, indoors among asymptomatic people is less than one percent. That being said, asymptomatic spread does happen. Here’s another review of some data from March 2021. This has many people wondering, if they’re not sick then why should they be subjected to these mandates?

Further, if vaccines are waning, and vaccinated people can still get sick and spread the virus, how are mandates going to stop the virus? The vaccine does not sterilize the virus either, further poking huge holes in a mandate narrative that lacks basic logic.

This article (NY Hospital Closes Maternity Ward As Healthcare Workers Resign Over Vaccine Mandates) was originally published on The Pulse and is published under a Creative Commons license.