Hospitals, healthcare facilities and nursing homes around Rhode Island have been dutifully firing their valued, ESSENTIAL employees to comply with Rhode Island’s rigid edict that all healthcare workers must receive the COVID-19 vaccine or lose their license.

Over ninety health care facilities, including Rhode Island Hospital, Miriam Hospital and dozens of nursing homes, were not able to comply by Friday’s deadline and have asked for a thirty day extension.

The entire premise of COVID-19 lockdowns and “fifteen days to flatten the curve” was to avoid overwhelming healthcare facilities.  That was accomplished in Rhode Island and throughout the US thanks in large part to the hard work of healthcare professionals at every level.  Now people who were correctly termed healthcare heroes for the last 18 months are being kicked to the curb at the instruction of Governor Dan McKee and his Director of Health Dr. Nicole Alexander-Scott.

Such a draconian measure requires a dire situation.  But as we look around, we see rather that we are in a much better place than we were eighteen months ago.  25% of US residents now have natural immunity, per the CDC.  53% are fully vaccinated.  We have known for a while that, thankfully, COVID 19 has a sky high survival rate of over 99%.

That’s what we know and it’s good news.  Conversely, here are the questions that McKee and Alexander-Scott have failed to answer to justify their deliberate effort to destabilize Rhode Island’s healthcare system.

• How many, what percentage of COVID cases have been from medical personnel to patient?
• Natural immunity is much stronger protection than any COVID vaccine and 84,000,000 residents of the United States have it.  Why have you failed to take it into consideration when setting COVID-19 public health policy?
• If COVID-19 vaccines work, why must the vaccinated fear a severe infection from the unvaccinated, in a healthcare setting or anywhere?

In the absence of these answers, Rhode Island’s vaccine mandate on healthcare workers is not just robotically inflexible but unnecessary.  It may well be that Governor McKee is receiving bad guidance and information from his Director of Health.  If so, he needs to figure this out and correct course.  On the present course, it sure looks like Governor McKee and Dr. Alexander-Scott are trying to accomplish what COVID-19 did not.  Let us hope that they fail and that reason and sanity is quickly restored to Rhode Island’s public health policy.

Featured image by Moritz Mentges on Unsplash.