Some of yesterday’s front-line medical heroes are today’s villains.
Novant Health, a North Carolina-based company that operates hospitals and clinics across the Tarheel State, Georgia, South Carolina and Virginia, has fired 175 employees who refused to comply with a mandate that required them they had to get vaccinated against the coronavirus.
A week ago, 375 employees who were still hesitant to get vaccinated for their own personal reasons were given an ultimatum by the company: Take the shot, or lose your jobs.
Two hundred of them broke down and to big government and private business medical tyranny. The remaining 175 who chose body autonomy over threats were terminated on Monday, according to WSOC-TV in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Laura Rushing, a nurse who spent more than a decade-and-a-half with the company, spoke with WSOC about losing her job.
“When they put the mandate out there, one thing I knew for sure was, I was not gonna take the shot. So, I put in for a religious exemption and got denied,” Rushing told the station.
“Who decided my religious exemption, the wording used, was not good enough?” she asked. “It wasn’t as good as someone else’s? That just feels like discrimination and I didn’t appreciate it.”
Rushing at some point might have a case for discrimination, and she might not. Surely, she never signed on with the expectation that at some point, her superiors would demand she take an injection for a disease that didn’t yet exist, so there’s that.
Perhaps she had acquired immunity to COVID and didn’t want to chance facing an adverse vaccine reaction. We know that, whatever her reasoning was, it should have been her business, and no one else’s.
This is a woman who presumably showed up to work last year for every shift when the globe was afraid after a novel virus from China began sending Americans to the hospital. That’s the kind of person President Joe Biden once called a hero — and not that long ago.
“I’ve often said: if there are angels in heaven, they’re nurses,” Biden said in a Twitter post published May 6. “Nurses have given so much, and saved so many lives throughout the course of this pandemic.”
I’ve often said: if there are angels in heaven, they’re nurses. Nurses have given so much, and saved so many lives throughout the course of this pandemic.
On this first day of National Nurses Week — know that I am deeply thankful, and will always fight for you.
— President Biden (@POTUS) May 6, 2021
Biden last month called for people like Rushing to lose their jobs, unless they showed proof of vaccination. Novant Health obliged him and others who are demanding two classes of society — those who get vaccinated, and those who don’t deserve to earn a living.
According to WSOC, Novan first issued the mandate July 22, requiring all employees to be vaccinated by Sept. 15. Employees who didn’t comply were suspended without pay and given a chance to comply, according to a Sept. 21 Novant news release. Then came the terminations.
This all happened Monday as the country faces what The New York Times in August reported is a “crisis” in nursing as understaffed hospitals leave patients “at risk.”
The people running Novant Health didn’t think twice about cutting her loose. In fact, they’re hiring.
“We are always recruiting, and any recruitment efforts would not be in direct response to the mandate. Like healthcare systems across the country, we are being impacted by a national nursing shortage, which existed prior to the pandemic and has been further exacerbated by the pandemic,” a company representative told WSOC.
“We continue to be proactive in addressing this shortage, and have developed comprehensive staffing contingency plans to prepare for an array of different scenarios.”
Speaking separately to WSOC, a doctor with Novant essentially equated Rushing and her former colleagues to potential killers.
“The No. 1 medical ethical principle is, ‘We do not cause harm to patients or certainly cause their death,’” said Dr. David Priest. “There are 680,000 Americans who have died, and we cannot contribute to that number, not a single time. One is too many.”
Just to summarize, here’s what was know: People who are consumed by the politicized coronavirus pandemic view heroes as expendable, people who are vaccinated against COVID can still contract and spread it; and hospitals are letting good people go while they complain about being understaffed.
So, who are the villains here?
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.