The same geniuses in New York who thought it was a good idea to ship COVID patients to nursing homes are now in charge of enforcing vaccine mandates among hospital and nursing home employees. Not surprisingly, thousands of employees balked at being forced to take the vaccine. And now those employees are being fired, placing even greater stress on an already overburdened healthcare system.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul mandated all healthcare workers in the state receive the COVID vaccine. And now that the deadline has passed and roughly 16% of healthcare workers are estimated not to have received the vaccine, hospitals are going ahead with firing those employees.
As a result, some hospitals have had to cancel elective surgeries due to a shortfall of personnel. And the real effects of the nursing shortage will likely take weeks to fully appreciate.
Governor Hochul has threatened to bring in the National Guard and foreign nurses to fill the gap, but that is likely only to be temporary and won’t help anything. Besides, every National Guard nurse or doctor is likely already working somewhere else in the healthcare system, so that’s just shuffling deckchairs. And bringing in foreign nurses isn’t going to help anything either, as foreign nurses likely won’t know the proper procedures for working in US hospitals.
This entire fiasco underscores the fact that the COVID crisis is largely the result of hospital mismanagement rather than a uniquely deadly disease. Hospitals managed as for-profit corporations are run by paper pushers and bean counters who are more concerned with generating high profits to look good for investors than they are with actually meeting patient needs.
That’s why nurses are overworked and medical procedures are carried out with an eye towards maximizing billing, not necessarily towards what works best for the patient. Even with the response to COVID we saw improper procedures being practiced, and hospitals worn thin with overworked staff. It’s not radical to state that not every hospital is well-run, and that poorly run hospitals will lead to more deaths.
What New York is doing now will only ensure more deaths from COVID and other illnesses, thanks to its misguided desire to force COVID vaccinations on everyone. Now that thousands of nurses are being let go for no good reason, patients will once again have to suffer so that their political leaders can try to prove a point.
This article was originally posted on Red Tea News.
