Dartmouth Health’s recent decision to require its employees to get a COVID-19 vaccine booster wasn’t exactly stop-the-presses news — after all, the health system mandated the original two-shot series last fall. However, staff writer Nora Doyle-Burr’s story reporting this sensible and expected follow-up decision contained some perplexing and dismaying internal dissent.
Speaking anonymously because of DH’s myopic prohibition on employees talking to the press without authorization, a long-time nurse told Doyle-Burr that she questioned the timing of the mandate amid an acute staffing shortage. “We are absolutely bleeding for help,” she said. “It seems like a terrible time to tick staff off.”
And although she said she planned to adhere to the Nov. 4 deadline to receive the booster, she expressed fear that the requirement might hasten the departure of overworked colleagues. She also asserted that if the benefit of the booster shot is that it reduces the severity of infection, then she ought to be allowed to run that risk.
One can only hope that this is a case of an individual projecting her fears and frustrations onto a larger group, not an expression of widespread discontent among “ticked off” nurses. Health-care workers are entitled to run exactly no risks that endanger the well-being of patients and colleagues. Moreover, any who do not subscribe to the scientific basis of public health protocols have no business being in the health-care business, staffing shortage or no. And given that new boosters targeting the Omicron variants will be available soon, that’s all the more reason to require DH employees to get them. Although transmission rates are not high in this part of the world at present, that does not mean they will remain that way this fall.
The pandemic has receded from public consciousness to a degree, but it remains a potent threat. The United States is averaging more than 80,000 new infections a day at present, with almost 400 deaths daily. In three years, COVID has killed more than a million Americans and led to the sharpest two-year decline in life expectancy in almost a century. America and the rest of the world are not out of the pandemic woods yet by any measure we are aware of; weary as Americans are of the necessary precautions, they are still necessary. And up-to-date vaccination is still the best protection available.
News that a young adult in Rockland County, New York, recently became paralyzed from polio is a timely reminder of the need to remain vigilant in the face of threats to public health. Polio was once a terrifying scourge of summer in America; a nationwide vaccination program in the late 1950s and early 1960s cut the number of cases dramatically. In fact, the last case in the United States before the recent one was in 2013. But while polio vaccination rates remain relatively high nationally and the vaccine remains highly effective, there are pockets of the country where rates are much lower, including Rockland County. The 20-year-old who contracted it there was unvaccinated.
In that context, the attempt in New Hampshire to invalidate the Department of Health and Human Services’ new form to claim a religious exemption from childhood vaccination requirements is a reminder of how serious a menace anti-vaxxers are. The point of the form is to comply with a new state law that makes it easier to claim a religious exemption, but it also includes a requirement to declare which of the required vaccines parents decline on behalf of their children and to acknowledge that their decision may result in the illness of their children and the infection of others.
The anti-vaccination crowd objects to these common-sense provisions on spurious constitutional grounds. If there is any doctrine, religious or otherwise, at work in this anti-vaccination effort, it is one that calls for sacrificing the safety of children and others on the altar of Personal Choice. To say the least, we do not worship in that church.
As with abortion and gun control, the anti-vaccination movement represents the attempt of a highly vocal and determined minority to impose its will on society at large. That’s not the way democracy works, unless the majority allows it to — which so far it has. That’s why it is becoming ever more urgent to change that dynamic, beginning with this fall’s mid-term elections.