As federal COVID-19 vaccine mandates are being implemented, those in the Lubbock community have voiced their opinions.
Both the Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) finalized vaccine mandates on Nov. 4.
University Medical Center (UMC) Chief Experience Officer Aaron Davis said OSHA's mandate affects UMC clinics, while the UMC hospital is affected by the CMS mandate.
Davis said the position of UMC continues to be that they encourage and want people to get the vaccine and that the vaccine is safe and effective.
However, Davis said UMC does not agree with the mandate.
"You know, they've been working to save people and help the community for, you know, two years," Davis said, "and to kind of go back with this mandate to force the very people that cared for those community members almost out of a job, it just doesn't seem right, so no, we're really not in favor about the way it was brought about.
Davis said despite their stance, UMC has to enforce the mandate because they receive CMS funds.
Dr. Sandra Dickerson, the president of the Lubbock County Medical Society, said the vaccine mandates are nothing new, and health care workers have routinely had to deal with these requirements before.
"This is not a new thing for mandates like that to come out," Dickerson said, "to say, 'If you want to practice here, you must prove that you are not going to transmit these diseases to our patients.'"
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit temporarily stopped OSHA's mandate, but the CMS mandate is still in place in most states, including Texas.
However, U.S. District Judge Matthew Schelp stopped the CMS mandate for now in 10 states after a lawsuit was filed in the Eastern District of Missouri.
Texas filed its own lawsuit against the rule on Nov. 15, but no ruling has come from that.
Eleah Lehnen said she is unvaccinated, and she was fired from her job at KCBD-TV due to their vaccine mandate, given from their parent company Gray Television.
Since being fired, Lehnen's Facebook shows that she has participated in multiple protests with Health Freedom of Lubbock, an organization that fights against medical mandates, including vaccine mandates and vaccine passports, according to their website.
Lehnen said healthcare workers were heroes in 2020 working around the clock to fight a pandemic that is still going on, and she said she cannot understand why a hospital would be willing to lose members of its staff at this moment.
"It is mind-boggling to me that you would be willing to lose almost half of your staff and personnel during a pandemic when I know these hospitals are already skin and bones as far as staffing is concerned," Lehnen said.
Dickerson said she does not think these mandates will cause widespread problems with staffing. Davis said the number at UMC is down from about 1,300 unvaccinated employees a few weeks ago to about 300-400 now.
However, Dickerson did talk about why health care workers should get the vaccine.
"When someone chooses to be unvaccinated and then transmits a disease to a vulnerable person - a patient, a cancer patient, a child, a baby - that's a tragedy, and our profession is a helping profession," Dickerson said. "We're there to help people, and you know they always say, the first rule is 'do no harm.'
"So if you're going to be harming people, then you shouldn't be practicing."
(This has been edited to omit the podcast interview and change the title casing to be in proper AP format. Everything else is left as is.)
Credits:
(Nathan Boles)