A defiant nurse lashes out over vaccine mandate

Jennifer Semrow worked for 12 years as a certified nursing assistant and put herself through college as a single mother of two young children, finally graduating as a registered nurse around the time coronavirus hit.

Now the Middletown resident holds a great job at a rehabilitation provider in Connecticut, working with patients and long-term residents, doing what she loves, for good money.

And she’s willing to give it up — all because she declines to be vaccinated for COVID-19.

“Let them fire me,” Semrow told me as she and some friends protested the state’s back-to-school mask mandate at the state Capitol over the weekend. “It’s my right.”

The 33-year-old Semrow insists she is not, in her words, an anti-vaxxer. “I’m

an anti-medical-mandate,” she said.

She doesn’t believe she needs the vaccine. Whatever her reasons — and like most vaccine holdouts, hers are deeply held and complex — Semrow stands on a collision course with Gov. Ned Lamont’s inoculation mandate for all employees of longterm care facilities.

The deadline for a first injection arrives Sept. 7 — next Tuesday — and Semrow isn’t budging.

“My body doesn’t belong to my employer. My body doesn’t belong to the government. My body belongs to me and I mandate and say what goes into my body. And so, to have a job or the government tell me that this needs to go into my body is against everything that I believe.”

As we spoke alongside a line of protesters including Semrow’s mother, supporters drove by on Capitol Avenue, honking — clearly energizing Semrow, who waved her “unmask our kids” sign. Her black T-shirt read, “When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty ... Thomas Jefferson.”

That is exactly how Semrow views this standoff.

“I’m willing to lose my job over it,” she said, a slight smile, eyes behind large, round sunglasses. “I will fight the good fight.”

She’s in a minority among health care workers, but Semrow isn’t alone. Next to her with a protest sign was Beryl Hoelscher, a registered nurse who moved to Connecticut in March from Austin, Texas. Hoelscher was able to transfer her license but has not found a job as a nurse — despite an astounding 4,000 openings in the field, a number my colleague Alexander Soule reported this week.

“They say, ‘Have you been vaccinated?’ And if you say no, they tell me, ‘We can’t hire you,’ ” Hoelscher said.

She had COVID-19 in June, she said, so she feels protected by the antibodies and has declined the vaccination. She and her husband, Michael, tell me they moved here for the beauty of nature, not jobs. We talk about New England hikes.

Most of Hoelscher’s job searches happened before Lamont’s order, when long-term care providers could hire an unvaccinated nurse. But this is Connecticut, not Texas or Florida.

Semrow’s employer was among the bulk of nursing homes and rehab centers that did not require a vaccination all these months, she said, even though health care workers were eligible starting last Dec. 14. Under Lamont’s order, the company faces a $20,000-perday fine if any of its staff, or volunteers, or outside contractors, have access to patients and lack an inoculation.

The industry supports the order. That means Semrow’s employer would most likely fire her even as it faces a dire worker shortage. The state’s largest health care union, SEIU District 1199, has formally asked Lamont to delay the order by a month, saying even though it strongly favors vaccinations, the workers and employers need more time.

Lamont had not granted the extension as of late Tuesday.

I ask Semrow, who is not in a union, whether she worries that she’s spreading COVID-19 unwittingly to sick and elderly patients, residents and other people. Not at all, she said, even though she has cared for many people with the illness.

“I’m very confident in my immune system and I know I didn’t have COVID because I was weekly tested,” she said. “I wore my mask. I followed all the mandates that needed to be followed. I did everything that was asked of me, and I never got COVID.”

Science says unvaccinated, front-line health care workers could be a danger to themselves and others. And many of us in this highly vaccinated, blue state may say Semrow’s stand defies logic, and worse. The mandate for patient-serving health care workers, without an option to to test as an alternative, makes sense in a pandemic that took the lives of 3,894 Connecticut nursing home residents alone as of Aug. 18.

Still, there’s something admirable about Semrow’s resolve, especially after all she did to achieve what she has. Her own children, 8 and 10, did have the main early childhood vaccinations required in schools but haven’t had any follow-up vaccinations in a couple of years.

“I didn’t really start opening my eyes and getting really involved until 2020,” she said.

She doesn’t easily express in words how she feels now that the reckoning could be days away. “I worked very, very hard, I’m a single mom to two kids, I put myself through college, I worked while I went to school. I earned this degree and now I feel it’s a threat that I might not be able to use it because of .... ”

She hesitates. “A personal choice.”

“But I’m Irish, I’m very stubborn.”

Her mother, protesting a few feet away, and her father, who’s a former professional bicycle racer from Ireland, both support her decision and are not vaccinated, she said. They live in Middletown, too. She’s upset that her dad can’t return to his visit his homeland without a vaccination.

I ask whether she will invoke a religious exemption, allowed for workers under federal civil rights law. “I’ve considered it,” she said, without claiming that her refusal is based on religious beliefs. “But part of me wants all of the health care workers that are against this mandate to walk out and watch how quickly the health care system crumbles.”

Across all nursing homes earlier in August when Lamont issued his order, 71 percent of employees were vaccinated — about the same as the general population. Semrow knows of at least five, including four direct care workers, at her employer.

She’s on a 32-hour week, she said, but typically pulls in 45 to 50 hours a week — and come Jan. 1, under a new state law, nursing homes must increase direct care per resident from at least 1.9 hours a day to 3 hours a day.

That’s a worry to SEIU District 1199. “We’re getting some holdouts and some stories of people realizing that they will not survive in this industry without getting vaccinated,” union spokesman Pedro Zayas said.

At least one home, he said, “is probably not going to pull it off by Sept. 7,” and will be forced to move residents, raising risk of accidents.

“Coercion is not consent,” Semrow said. “Convincing someone to get a vaccine is coercion.”

And so, she holds out as the hardest core, decrying the pharmaceutical companies for their coronavirus profits. The Food and Drug Administration approval on Aug. 23 didn’t sway her a whit. It’s hard not to wonder what role former President Donald Trump, and Trumpism, play in her proud defiance — but then, that doesn’t really matter anymore.

A fully outfitted bicycle rider in a bright shirt rolls by. “Idiots,” he says, three feet from Semrow.

“We can all disagree,” she says, raising the ultimate question about the mandates. “We’re not trying to make him not take the vaccine.”