Health workers refusing vaccines have forgotten, ‘First, do no harm’
A month ago, I woke up with a piercing pain in my lower left abdomen. It was early Saturday morning, and my husband drove me to the emergency room at Anne Arundel Medical Center, now part of the Luminus Health.
A CT scan revealed a rectus sheath hematoma, an accumulation of blood in the abdominal muscle, likely caused by blunt force to my abdomen from a fall on the ice a few days earlier.
I was fortunate to be among the majority of those afflicted with this rare condition to have the hematoma resolving on its own, without arthroscopic surgery.
I spent three nights and 2 ½ days in the hospital, tended to by rotating shifts of doctors, nurses and technicians. There was blood drawn, temperatures monitored, intravenous needles inserted, lots of prods and pokes. These frontline health care providers were within inches of my body, around the clock.
“Too dangerous,” “too new” and “I’m waiting until the one comes out that covers all the variants.” The scariest response was: “I’m around COVID a lot and I haven’t gotten it yet.”Healtcare workers at AAMC who have yet to get COVID-19 vaccines
At the time, I had just received my first vaccine, semi-protected against the virus, though not wholly safe. As a patient at a hospital during a pandemic, I had the right to ask people touching me if they had shots.
All the doctors who popped in to translate the results of my blood work told me they had received COVID-19 vaccines. Very few of the nurses that treated me had gotten, or wanted to get, vaccinated.
When I asked why, the answers ranged from “too dangerous,” “too new” to “I’m waiting until the one comes out that covers all the variants.” The scariest response was: “I’m around COVID a lot and I haven’t gotten it yet.”
If the thousands of patients in hospitals and assisted living facilities across America are asking the same questions they would be getting the same answers. Despite being prioritized for COVID-19 vaccinations by the Centers for Disease Control, nearly half of front-line health care workers in our country have not gotten one or more doses, according to a survey conducted by the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation.
While there is no current promise of universal protection, these vaccines are an important first step, as stated below in a report issued by the World Health Organization last month:
“The COVID-19 vaccines that are currently in development or have been approved are expected to provide at least some protections against new virus variants because these vaccines elicit a broad immune response involving a range of antibodies and cells.”
All employees of Anne Arundel Medical Center must get the flu shot, a vaccine authorized for general use by the FDA. This requirement for COVID immunization in health care facilities, so urgently necessary in the midst of a still-raging pandemic, cannot be mandated because the FDA authorizes the vaccine as “emergency use” only.
Justin McLeod, a spokesperson for Luminis Health, sent me this statement:
“We encourage staff and volunteers to receive the COVID-19 vaccine and continue to offer the vaccine to all staff and volunteers. To date, 76% of the staff and volunteers at Luminis Health-Anne Arundel Medical Center have been vaccinated. While our policy is for all staff and volunteers to receive the influenza vaccination each year, the COVID19 vaccine is new and has received emergency use authorization; therefore, receiving the COVID-19 vaccine is voluntary and aligns with many health-care systems today.”
The nurses on my case were kind and capable, but hey? Who wants to feel like you might get sick instead of healed by those assigned to your hospital bedside?
The choice to be a health care provider during a pandemic that has killed 551,000 Americans should include a personal moral and ethical choice to get the vaccine — unless there is an underlying medical condition that prohibits the shots.
“As somebody who has worked in the healthcare industry for the past 50 years, I just don’t get it. As soon as the FDA approves this vaccine for general use, it should be a condition of your employment”Dr. Dwight Fortier, retired managing partner of Annapolis Pediatrics
A couple of prominent Annapolis doctors weighed in on front-line workers who refuse vaccines.
“I am very frustrated about this,” said Dr. Victor Plavner, a partner in the family practice Maryland Primary Care Physicians. “The risk of catching and spreading the virus far outweighs any side effects of the vaccine. If you want to care for patients, you should care enough to get vaccinated and keep yourself and your patients out the ICU with a potential deadly illness.”
The other physician I interviewed also had a firsthand experience with fear when he recently spent a day in the hospital.
“I did the same thing as you did — I asked everyone who treated me, ‘have you had your shots yet?’ “said Dr. Dwight Fortier, now retired after 30 years as the managing partner of Annapolis Pediatrics. “I was stunned (by) how many folks said they had not gotten vaccines. As somebody who has worked in the health care industry for the past 50 years, I just don’t get it. As soon as the FDA approves this vaccine for general use, it should be a condition of your employment.”
The following is the concluding recommendation contained in an American Medical Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs report adopted at the November 2020 AMA Special Meeting on Covid-19 vaccines among the medical community:
“Physician practices and health care institutions have a further responsibility to limit patient and staff exposure to individuals who are not immunized, which may include requiring unimmunized individuals to refrain from direct patient contact.”
As I heal at home, I think of why we place our trust in our health care providers to make the right choices: They willfully, often passionately, entered a profession that revolves around this vow: “First, do no harm.”