Health care needs a sure shot in the arm

Every day a new public argument plays out on the front page of the newspaper about which societal group — teachers, students, workers, firefighters — not only ought to get vaccinated against the novel coronavirus, but must get vaccinated. These are important and fascinating discussions, the outcome of which will greatly affect the public health.

Our position is that everyone who can get vaccinated should get vaccinated. But, leaving that briefly aside, it must be said there are at least plausible reasons for hesitancy for a very, very few individuals’ own good health, among some of these societal groups.

There are probably some health care workers for whom that’s legitimately the case too. But for the vast majority of the unvaccinated working in health care settings, it’s illogical not to get vaccinated.

The vaccines are safe. They reduce the risk of infection. They reduce the risk of serious illness. They reduce the risk of death. It’s a matter of safety, for them and the patients with whom they come in contact, that they take by far the best precaution, one that is now easily available.

And yet, as staff writer Terri Sforza so succinctly reported this week: “They work in hospitals. They have easy access to jabs. They know the risks. Yet after a frenetic rollout and urgent pleas from officials on nearly bent knees, almost a quarter of California’s hospital workers remained unvaccinated for COVID-19.”

That’s unacceptable for the health of the rest of us. And it’s happening not just here but all over this country at a time when we are again free to travel. It’s the kind of capricious behavior that will lead to more economic crises and social-distancing lockdowns.

“We fought this virus, and we were winning with the vaccine,” Randy Bury, chief executive of a Midwestern nonprofit elder-care chain, told The New York Times after it was shown his nursing home patients were again being infected with COVID-19 by unvaccinated staffers. So Bury laid down the law. His chain became one of the largest in the country to order mandatory vaccines for all members of its staff.

Short of following that lead, we urge health care workers without valid medical concerns to reconsider their reluctance and do what’s best for their health and the health of those they work with.