153 out of work over staff vaccine order

More than 150 employees at a Houston hospital system have been fired or have resigned after the medical system implemented a mandate requiring a COVID-19 vaccine and a judge dismissed an employee lawsuit over it.

The hospital system had required employees to complete their immunization by June 7. One hundred seventy-eight employees were suspended for two weeks without pay for not complying.

And after the suspension period ended Tuesday, 153 employees either resigned or were terminated for not completing their inoculations, a spokesperson for Houston Methodist Hospital system told The Associated Press.

A federal judge threw out the lawsuit last week that had been filed by 117 employees over the requirement. They have appealed.

Hospital workers risked their lives during the pandemic, and many died of the virus, but a USA TODAY survey of some of the largest hospital networks and public hospitals in the country revealed that hospital worker vaccination rates vary widely.

The Houston Methodist controversy “foreshadows the coming months,” said Ogbonnaya Omenka, an associate professor and public health specialist at Butler University in Indianapolis.

Mandates that may seem like the obvious choice to many people must be “implemented within a human context,” he told USA TODAY this month.

U.S. News & World Report ranks Houston Methodist the best hospital in Texas, and Newsweek listed it as the 18th-best in the country. Eighty-five percent of employees were inoculated by April.

In the days after the lawsuit was dismissed, other prominent hospitals followed Houston Methodist’s lead with vaccine mandates: Indiana University Health, Johns Hopkins, NewYork Presbyterian, the University of Pennsylvania and most hospitals in the Washington, D.C., area have said they will require the shots.

More than 45% of Americans are fully vaccinated.