60% of Ohio nursing home workers refuse vaccine
As the coronavirus vaccine dribbles out far more slowly than promised, many of the people who can get it are refusing to do so.
Gov. Mike DeWine on Wednesday said that a whopping 60% of nursing home workers who have been offered the vaccine have refused it.
The news comes amid disappointing vaccination numbers across Ohio, which was told by the Trump administration that it would receive more than 530,000 doses of the vaccines by the end of December. Just 94,000 so far have been administered.
“I am not satisfied with where we are in Ohio,” DeWine said during a coronavirus press conference. “We’re not moving fast enough, but we’re going to get there.”
He said he had a Wednesday morning conference call with CEOs of Ohio hospital systems and set a goal of getting the covid vaccine into people’s arms within 24 hours of when hospitals receive it. DeWine said the job of distributing the vaccine is more complex than many appreciate, but it’s vital to do it quickly.
“There’s a moral imperative to get this out just as quickly as we can,” he said.
But the numbers emerging from nursing homes might portend something just as bad.
“Our bigger concern is the amount of staff who are not taking it,” DeWine said. “I don’t have data in front of me, but anecdotally, it looks like somewhere around 40% of staff at nursing homes are taking the vaccines and 60% are not taking it.”
Those figures are disturbing not only because of what they might say about attitudes toward the vaccines among the larger population. They also mean that most staffers will be unprotected as they move between the outside world and nursing homes filled with vulnerable people — some of whom will not be able to take the vaccine for medical reasons.
Even so, DeWine said he isn’t going to make anybody take it.
“I’m not going to compel anybody to do it, but I’m urging people to take that vaccine,” he said. “It’s very important,”
It’s not clear why the governor isn’t imposing such a requirement.
All 50 states have laws requiring — with exemptions — that children be vaccinated before going to school. Also, many healthcare facilities require employees to be vaccinated.
A DeWine spokesman didn’t immediately respond when asked why DeWine wouldn’t order Ohio nursing homes to follow suit.
Ohio’s problems distributing the coronavirus vaccine come amid national problems producing and distributing the two vaccines that so far have received approval. With hospital beds filling, the country is falling far short of the Trump administration’s promises.
The administration said that 20 million Americans would be vaccinated by the end of December, but so far, only 11.4 million doses have been sent to states and just 2.1 million people have received a first dose, the Washington Post reported Tuesday.
At the current pace, it will take 10 years to vaccinate enough Americans to achieve herd immunity, NBC reported.
Among those promising 20 million vaccinated Americans by the end of 2020 was U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams. He made the statement just 11 days ago in a press conference with DeWine.
Adams dismissed reports that vaccine doses were coming to states at substantially lower levels than promised as blips that are to be expected in such a complex project. He also scoffed at the need to invoke the Defense Production Act to scale up production of approved vaccines, saying the manufacturers were operating at full capacity.
Three days later, the New York Times reported that Pfizer, manufacturer of one of the vaccines, was close to a deal with the administration to use the Defense Production Act to obtain more of the materials to make it. Pfizer had been asking for such help since September, the story said.
https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2020/12/30/60-of-ohio-nursing-home-workers-refuse-vaccine/
More testing....that should be the answerDoes anyone notice more and more people around them getting this shyt? Back in March I was just seeing things on the news. Now it’s actually people I know getting covid left and right
LA collapsing...
They don't have the staff, so more civilian hospitals won't help. California also has very arbitrary rules about their nursing licensing, and earlier this year when the need was not high the nursing union in the state killed a request to temporarily allow access to out of state nurses from compact states.Need to do what china did and built like 3 hospitals in a month
They don't have the staff, so more civilian hospitals won't help. California also has very arbitrary rules about their nursing licensing, and earlier this year when the need was not high the nursing union in the state killed a request to temporarily allow access to out of state nurses from compact states.
Now if the military dock one of the fully staffed hospital ships that will help. Or if a military hospital is built, all state nursing and medical license s are valid at military hospitals
The nursing board has been allowing out of state licenses. The issue is they are not paying enough for people to leave high paying and cheaper states like Texas and Nevada and go to Cali.
They need to waive taxes and give free housing with a high rate like NY did. I may go and help cuz the vaccine is already out.
Anyway my brehs Happy New Year.
Does anyone else find it troubling that it’s been over a year and they still don’t have a definitive origin of this virus.
They were able to develop multiple vaccines faster than they could tell you exactly where it came from or who was patient zero.
Yahoo is now a part of Verizon Media
Hospital worker fired for deliberately leaving hundreds of Covid vaccine doses out of refrigerator
Gino Spocchia
Thu, 31 December 2020, 3:17 pm GMT·2-min read
Moderna covid vaccines
(AP)
A Wisconsin hospital worker was fired after they admitted to deliberately damaging hundreds of doses of a Covid vaccine.
According to the Aurora Medical Center in Grafton, Wisconsin, a worker at the hospital admitted to deliberately sabotaging some 500 doses on Wednesday.
The hospital had been led to believe that the worker removed 500 vaccine doses from a hospital refrigerator and left them overnight in “human error”, as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.
But the worker, who has since been fired, said they deliberately damaged 57 vials of the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine doses when they removed them on Friday night.
Along with the vaccine produced by Pfizer, Moderna’s vaccine needs to be kept refrigerated. They are the only two vaccinations against Covid with current approval in the US.
The hospital "notified appropriate authorities for further investigation," having launched an internal probe into the matter.
The police department in Grafton, outside Milwaukee, said it had been notified by Aurora about "an employee tampering with vials of the Covid-19 vaccine" on Wednesday evening.
According to the Journal Sentinel, the FBI and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are also investigating.
“We continue to believe that vaccination is our way out of the pandemic," Advocate Aurora Health said in a statement.
"We are more than disappointed that this individual's actions will result in a delay of more than 500 people receiving their vaccine.”
The health provider added that the damage “was a violation of our core values, and the individual is no longer employed by us”.
The incident will likely raise concerns about public confidence in the vaccines against Covid, which has now claimed more than 340,000 lives.
According to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, some 12.4 million Covid vaccine doses have been administered across the United States on Thursday.
The Trump administration had previously claimed some 20 million would receive doses before the end of the year, which is now unachievable.
Wtf wow thats just evil