NYT helped create new hospital crisis over mandates
September 29, 2021
Thousands of health care workers face termination as vaccine mandates go into effect across the county, showing that the whatever concerns the press had about hospital shortages putting patients at risk last month have succumbed to the worry that someone, somewhere will get treated by a qualified nurse who hasn’t been vaccinated.
It’s almost as if the media, like the government, just wants to create a crisis so it has something more to do.
After all, it was just a few weeks that the New York Times said that the nation’s hospitals, especially in the South, faced crisis conditions because of a surge of COVID-19 cases.
“Hospitals in the southern United States are running dangerously low on space in intensive care units, as the Delta variant has led to spikes in coronavirus cases not seen since last year’s deadly winter wave,” the New York Times reported on September 14.
And the biggest bottleneck to expanding hospital capacity isn’t a shortage of space or beds – it’s a shortage of staff.
“The staffing shortages have a hospital-wide domino effect. When hospitals lack nurses to treat those who need less intensive care, emergency rooms and I.C.U.s are unable to move out patients, creating a traffic jam that limits their ability to admit new ones,” the New York Times reported in August, warning that the staff shortages put patients at risk.
Now that vaccine mandates have started to create terminations among health care workers, the New York Times is at least acknowledging that the mandates will likely cause staff shortages in hospitals.
“Depending on how many health care workers are fired, the policy could also test the resiliency of New York’s health care system. Hospitals across the state are activating emergency staffing plans that they typically reserve for natural disasters or, more recently, surges in Covid-19 cases. Volunteers, students and retirees will fill vacancies, along with traveling nurses,” the Times wrote as the mandates go into effect.
But the Times can’t get away that easily, as if creating a manmade health care crisis is an interesting exercise in good government.
One reason why vaccine mandates have gone into effect is that publications like the New York Times have been pushing for it all summer, saying that the unvaccinated are stopping the rest of the country from getting back to normal, making people furious with them,
“Vaccine mandates are the policy manifestation of this frustration,” said the Times in July. “They effectively tell the unvaccinated that their decision is hurting others and that society has an interest in pushing them to change. They can refuse, but they will pay a price — in lost access to a job, a college campus or other shared experiences where they may infect other people.”
And others will pay a price in not getting the medical treatment they deserve, because the government decided that firing health care workers serves some greater good, in an algebraic formula that only government finds comforting.
The price, unfortunately, will be the lives of those who just need health care.