NYS healthcare workers against mandatory vaccines

 Dr. Richard F. Daines M.D.

As health care workers, we have selflessly served our communities for many years. You have now effectively prevented us from taking responsibility for our own health, safety, and welfare.  We work side by side with professionals of various disciplines every day and share their thoughts.  Quite frankly, your unilateral healthcare directive bewilders us all.  We work diligently and cautiously to protect the health, safety of our patients.  We follow infection control practices and universal precautions to the letter and have executed our jobs selflessly in a manner that conforms to your high standards free from our fears or personal anxieties.  We have gone so far as to put our jobs before our families on many an occasion.  Working a holiday because of short staffing, working a double shift or staying overtime because of poor staffing, all at the expense of time spent with our families.  We expose ourselves to violent patients, maligned by those we care for while keeping composure and caring for the sick and dying with the utmost degree of compassion and selflessness.  We have stood with countless families at their loved ones death bed and offered the supportive care that comes with experience.  Never, hold the dedication of our practice, as an excuse for your misdirected and ill-conceived directive of mandatory vaccination.

Do not deem us as unpatriotic Sir, because we do not walk blindly into a vaccination program sponsored by you, and legislated by Governor Patterson.  Our concerns are genuine and our questions are legitimate and as of yet, have received no reasonable answers.  All we keep hearing is that we must comply, condition of employment, you will be terminated, what Sir, do you call this.  If this is not coercion under duress then please tell me what it is.  I remember somewhere in the far reaches of the mind that we are citizens of this country and not the property of the state.  The health and safety of our patients is a perfunctory argument. Do not confuse our efforts to stop this directive with selfishness, or lack of concern for our patients.  Our conscience tells us this is wrong.  Our professional co-workers tell us this is wrong, yes, even those with the auspicious title of MD tell us this is wrong.   Our support grows by the day Sir and it shall not be snuffed out by directive or legislation.   I know this is not the first attempt in your crusade for mandatory vaccinations, and I am sure it will not be your last. 

As healthcare workers, patient advocates, and state employees we demand to be addressed and considered.  Tenure has not been afforded to us as it has to those in academia.  We do not have the protection to dissent from prevailing public opinion, to openly disagree, provided protection from external pressure.  We find the displeasure of coercion as appealing as the taste of dejection. In an already stressed healthcare system it is my belief this directive will effectively eliminate a large part of those close to this issue. Those close to retirement and those sickened by the lack of concern for persons to feel safe and secure in their job and their profession, will quietly fade from this institution. Let me enlighten you Sir, there are many. Nurses, as patients, should be accorded the same respect for their decisions about health care, including the right to refuse a treatment that is due to all patients. In ethics this is called respect for patient autonomy.

I am also bewildered to hear that you have given your stamp of approval for pregnant women to receive the vaccine.  I am appalled because there have been absolutely no clinical trials regarding efficacy in the fetus.  What type of logic, or evidence-based practice has led you to this dangerous undertaking?  I can only assume, given your new beginnings of faith, that this is an evangelical crusade.  Sacrifice few for the good of many.  The truth is every vaccine has inherent risks and a certain percentage of the population will be effected adversely, some mild, and some dead.  I'm glad to see that is a risk YOU, are benevolently willing to take.  

Healthcare institutions will be short staffed Sir, but not for the reasons you may think.  Not because we have failed to be vaccinated with the "good stuff" but because we will be released from our duties for refusing to be jabbed with toxic substances such as;  Formaldehyde, Acrylonitrile, Thimerisol(mercury), Aluminum, Squalene to name a few.  Substances that are known carcinogens as well as linked to a host of auto-immune diseases. Nurses are accustomed to seeing the concrete benefits of their efforts and risks in individual patients. In this case, the benefit is diffuse and theoretical. We may be able to show that fewer patients get the flu, but we can't say that elderly Mr. Smith in room 210 with COPD didn't get the flu because we got vaccinated. The benefit to patients doesn't feel quite real while the risk to one's self does.

As stated in your own words, " The seasonal influenza vaccine has completed, and before its approval the new H1N1 vaccine also underwent, the most careful development, production and testing processes leading scientists, clinicians and public health authorities can devise. Approval of the H1N1 vaccine was based on the application of the same scientific standards and methods that we believe should govern all our health care practices."  This misleading information only serves as an obligatory statement that supports your position.  The fact is that the H1N1 vaccine has been through 1 clinical trial and has now been fast tracked for the general population tells me there is a different agenda at hand.  If the vaccine is so safe as you and your contingent claim it to be, then why are drug manufacturers absolved from responsibility should problems manifest?  

We, as healthcare workers are not willing to take that risk, as this is our declaration in opposition of your unilateral directive. Those who have signed this petition have taken a stand to end your most dangerous and oppressive directive.