Should EMS services be required to have the COVID vaccine?

[emt2359]

We were having this debate at our station.

What are your thoughts?

[Just Plain Ruff]

I'm mixed on this.  On one hand, the amount of people getting sick with Covid just boggles my mind.  Around 50% of the patients who come in the our emergency room and that we go get in the ambulance are either covid symptomatic or actually have covid.  For that reason I'd like to see everyone vaccinated but on the other hand.......

I totally understand the mentality that people have who do not want the shot.  I'm not sure that I agree with it but I'm not going to push a vaccine mandate on them.  

I am hearing of hospitals who are mandating for continued employment the vaccination and they are losing about 25% on average staff.   I' m sure the hospital or EMS system have taken into consideration how many people they may lose and are ok with that. 

For my EMS Agency (about 18 total people) we have at least 3 if not 4 that will quit if the vaccine becomes mandatory for continued employment and that would cripple our ability to fully staff/respond to the community.  As for the hospital itself, I'm thinking that around 25% of the staff will refuse the vaccination which would again, damage badly our ability to provide care to patients in need.  

yesterday case in point,  we had a transfer to a hospital about 200 miles away(the only hospital in a 400 mile radius that could take care of this patient) and I'm not sure if they got the patient transferred or not due to staffing levels.  Having one ambulance on a transfer of that distance and length of time leaves us with one ambulance in the entire county of around 20000 people/900 square miles.  We only average about 5 calls a week that put both our ambulances on the road at the same time (not including transfers) but you can see how having even a small number of staff down can really cause havoc.  

So I don't know the answer and I don't think there is.  

I am not anti vax like some people say, I'm antimandate.  

[Lone Star]

I'm also not 'anti-vax'...I AM anti-mandate!

I have questions that no one is able to answer, and until they are, I'm not getting the vaccine.  There has been far too much disinformation published, and when facts to refute the disinformation is posted, it gets censored.  I'm tired of it all!

First off, to my knowledge only 1 vaccine has been FDA approved, the other two are still being distributed under the Emergency Use Act.  Since they haven't received full FDA approval, they're still considered 'experimental drugs'.

 

[rock_shoes]

All of healthcare in British Columbia has mandatory vaccination. At this point anyone who has not received at least dose one has been placed on leave without pay. There are exemptions in place for those not medically able to be vaccinated.

Personally I don't have a problem with it. I had to provide proof of the standard schedule of vaccinations just to be allowed into my education programme (never mind to be employed). What reason would I have to expect anything different with respect to vaccination during a pandemic?

[yakc130]

Here's my jumbled thoughts.

The private that I'm at now is contracted to a "World Famous Clinic." 🙄 I think that we're doing about 100-175 transfers every 24 hours for them. I'm getting 1 covid pt every shift or so. All of them have been vaccinated.

A year ago, I found out that I had it. As of the beginning of last month, I still tested positive for antibodies.

My employer had a mandate in place that was effective 1 Dec stating that all employees had to be vaccinated. Even if you had antibodies, you were required to have a minimum of one shot. They had exemptions, but the last that I had heard, almost none of them were accepted.

Due to the injunction that was signed, I went to work on the first. For how long, I don't know.

 

Now, the technology they are using to make these vaccines is new. There's been a lot of stuff published about what it does/doesn't do to your body. From my understanding, a true vaccine will prevent you from getting something (polio). These are more like the flu shot. They make a guesstimate of the variant, and try to match it with a shot. You still can get it, but the symptoms "won't be as bad."

Most vaccines took years of experimentation to perfect. These were done in less than a year.

Depending on who's statistics you read, the numbers of infected/hospitalized/dead/dying/etc vary. Around me, they love to report on the number of new "cases." Well, if I were to go to a couple places and get tested in the same county, theoretically, each of those positive tests would count as a new case. How many are actually dying of covid versus comorbidities? Remember the reports of people being listed as a covid death even if they had a stroke or MI just because they tested positive?

When the prior administration was in office, the shot was a bad thing. Now, with the new administration, the shot is becoming a mandatory thing. Vax cards were never going to be required.

Masking and shut-downs were going to be a short-term thing. Here we are now, and just look.

Austria and Germany have announced plans for mandatory vaccination of ALL people. Unvaccinated people will not be allowed to go anywhere outside of their homes except for work, grocery shopping, and the doctor. Police will have authority to randomly stop people and check them for their vaccination status.

Australia was even worse, preventing people from leaving their houses, and crossing counties. (Unless you were a soccer team.) The people started rioting.

Politics has become so intertwined with all of this that I cannot even go there without using lots of swearing. Fauci, the Wuhan lab, natural immunity , one mask/two masks, 6-foot distancing, Ivermectin, vitamin D, etc., etc., etc.

I'm just so sick and tired of it all. It seems like stuff that was tin-foil hat theories six months ago is coming true now. What the hell is going on?

I have natural immunity for now, but apparently, that doesn't matter. I'm a bad person because I don't want to get this new, still experimental shot injected into my body yet. I'm a paria and an outcast. Big pharma seems to be the only ones getting rich off of all of this.

I want to wait for a while longer before I get jabbed. I want more evidence of how effective and what the side effects of these shots are. Then I will decide on what to put into my body. After all, wasn't that a big thing in the 60's and 70's? "My body. My choice." ??

Sorry. Rant off.