We have previously noted that the vaccine mandate by Philadelphia’s Acting Commissioner for Health Cheryl Bettigole would have the unintended consequence of exacerbating the already short staffing of health care facilities. Now comes The New York Times:

‘Nursing Is in Crisis’: Staff Shortages Put Patients at Risk

“When hospitals are understaffed, people die,” one expert warned as the U.S. health systems reach a breaking point in the face of the Delta variant.

by Andrew Jacobs | August 21, 2021

Cyndy O’Brien, an emergency room nurse at Ocean Springs Hospital on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, could not believe her eyes as she arrived for work. There were people sprawled out in their cars gasping for air as three ambulances with gravely ill patients idled in the parking lot. Just inside the front doors, a crush of anxious people jostled to get the attention of an overwhelmed triage nurse.

“It’s like a war zone,” said Ms. O’Brien, who is the patient care coordinator at Singing River, a small health system near the Alabama border that includes Ocean Springs. “We are just barraged with patients and have nowhere to put them.”

The bottleneck, however, has little to do with a lack of space. Nearly 30 percent of Singing River’s 500 beds are empty. With 169 unfilled nursing positions, administrators must keep the beds empty.

Nursing shortages have long vexed hospitals. But in the year and a half since its ferocious debut in the United States, the coronavirus pandemic has stretched the nation’s nurses as never before, testing their skills and stamina as desperately ill patients with a poorly understood malady flooded emergency rooms. They remained steadfast amid a calamitous shortage of personal protective equipment; spurred by a sense of duty, they flocked from across the country to the newest hot zones, sometimes working as volunteers. More than 1,200 of them have died from the virus.

Now, as the highly contagious Delta variant pummels the United States, bedside nurses, the workhorse of a well-oiled hospital, are depleted and traumatized, their ranks thinned by early retirements or career shifts that traded the emergency room for less stressful nursing jobs at schools, summer camps and private doctor’s offices.

“We’re exhausted, both physically and emotionally,” Ms. O’Brien said, choking back tears.

There’s a lot more at the original. For those who do not have a subscription to the Times, you can read it here for free.

The Times article notes that there are a huge number of hospitals which are very short staffed, but one point it ignores is the fact that the #VaccineMandates of do-gooders like Dr Bettigole and President Biden — whose #VaccineMandate applies only to nursing homes, not hospitals, can only reduce the number of registered nurses and certified nursing assistants available. It doesn’t matter what you think of their intentions; the consequences of their decisions can be very different from what they envision.

The Philadelphia Inquirer has an article from a week ago, which is still on their website’s main page, about hos the health care profession is trying to persuade, rather than force, people who have been resistant, to get vaccinated:

Some people’s minds are changing about the coronavirus vaccine. Here’s how doctors persuade them.

Deeply personal reasons are often why people who are initially reluctant decide to get vaccinated, said several physicians and vaccine providers.

by Erin McCarthy | August 16, 2021

Ritom Bhuyan wasn’t going to get the coronavirus vaccine. But three months ago, the 28-year-old rolled up his sleeve and got immunized.

What changed his mind? The health of his 65-year-old father, who struggled with COVID-19 for a month after the family all caught the virus. Bhuyan realized he wanted to protect his dad by getting vaccinated.

“My mom passed at a young age, so my dad’s all I have,” said Bhuyan, of Plymouth Meeting, “so when I saw him get sick with something potentially deadly, that kind of changed my mind.”

These deeply personal reasons are often why people who are initially reluctant decide to get vaccinated, said several physicians and vaccine providers, and finding those connections may be key to increasing vaccination.

With the delta variant sparking outbreaks in the country’s undervaccinated communities, causing case counts to rise across the Philadelphia region and prompting renewed masking rules, changing minds — and getting people to finally walk into a clinic and get their shot — has new urgency, they said.

Doctors recommend patience. Six months into the vaccine rollout, they say, people who haven’t been vaccinated may require some convincing, and open, fact-based, nonjudgmental conversations with those they trust can help.

Nonjudgmental? That’s sure not what the left have been doing! We have noted how so many on the left have obviously never read Dale Carnegie’s book How to Win Friends and Influence People, preferring instead to calling the people they (supposedly) want to persuade “selfish or stupid.”

Some people could sell ice to Eskimos, but some of these guys couldn’t sell ice water in Hell.

It’s a fairly long article, and unlike with the Times, I don’t have a work around for those who are not Inquirer subscribers.^[1]Both newspapers allow people a few free articles a month; if you aren’t a subscriber, but haven’t tried to open one of their articles recently, you can probably open the ones I have … Continue reading But it’s an article in which, rather than dripping with contempt and disdain for those who have chosen not to get vaccinated, is one which tries to illustrate that some — certainly not all — people who have been resistant to getting vaccinated can be persuaded.

We have previously noted that one of the problems with vaccine mandates is that not everyone will comply, and if people’s jobs are lost, then companies will have their own problems.

From The Wall Street Journal:

How Hard Should Employers Push Vaccines? Inside One Company’s Dilemma

As Delta variant spreads, Taylor Farms nudges 22,000 employees toward vaccination

By Jesse Newman | August 19, 2021 | 11:25 AM EDT

In a sprawling food processing plant on the outskirts of Nashville, Jon Matthews is expected to be everywhere. He oversees one million pounds of produce that flow into the plant daily to be sliced and separated into salads and sandwiches.

For months, Mr. Matthews’ employer, produce giant Taylor Farms, has been engaged in an all-hands effort to cajole its 22,000 employees to be vaccinated against Covid-19, offering on-site vaccination clinics and cash incentives. The company founder, Bruce Taylor, recorded a public-service announcement that plays in the hallways, employees said.

Mr. Matthews, 50, is among the many unpersuaded. The inventory supervisor is uncomfortable with the novel technology behind the vaccines and remains unconvinced it will protect him from infection, particularly in light of the Delta variant, which appears to break through faster than earlier strains.

“Thirty percent of me says it might be the smart thing to do,” Mr. Matthews said.

Mr. Taylor, his boss, has no such doubts. “I believe the vaccine is a miracle,” he said. “Why wouldn’t we take advantage of it?”

In a sane and free world, individuals will have the right to believe as they wish. In George Orwell’s 1984, the government of Oceania had its Ministry of Truth, which was supposed to manipulate all information, to push the people into all thinking one way. The Soviet Union tried the same thing, with the government in control of all publications and media, and with Правда (“Truth”) and Известия (“News”) as people’s primary sources of information, their thoughts were as government-guided as they could be.

Alas! Today’s left do not seem to believe that other people have a right to think differently, which is why they want Twitter and Facebook to censor things, in their favor, of course.

An impasse over vaccinations is bedeviling the corporate world. On one side are employers and employees eager to see theor co-workers be vaccinated, both out of health concerns and to head off the risk of an outbreak that slows production or shutters a workplace. On the other are the workers who see it as their right to decide when and if to vaccinate.

Some large companies, including Walmart Inc., Microsoft Corp., and Tyson Foods Inc. have imposed vaccine mandates. But the balance of power isn’t necessarily with every employer. Taylor’s 14 U.S. plants, which supply restaurants like Taco Bell Corp. and grocers like Whole Foods market, are already short some 1,500 employees. The tight labor market means that Mr. Taylor and others must be careful not to alienate workers who might go elsewhere.

“As much as I’d like to say it’s 100% required, I don’t want to lose 10% of my workforce,” Mr. Taylor said.

He doesn’t want to lose 10% of his workforce, huh? Some nursing homes in Kentucky are worried about losing “the majority of (their) staff,” and the high “potential to lose members, especially nurses, when there are few replacement opportunities in my area.” Of course, patient care personnel are licensed, unlike hamburger flippers, meaning that it’s difficult to just go out on the street to find people to fill those jobs.

There’s more at the original. But in something unusual for the Journal, the reporting that Walmart has imposed a vaccine mandate isn’t quite accurate:

Walmart, for example, will require all of its corporate and regional staff to be vaccinated against Covid-19 by October 4 unless they have an “approved exception,” namely, a religious or medical reason not to be vaccinated. But it isn’t asking the same of store associates and warehouse workers, to whom it is instead offering a $150 incentive for getting vaccinated (it previously offered $75) and paid time off. McDonald’s has taken a similar approach and is requiring its US corporate workers to be vaccinated by September 27 while offering restaurant employees at the locations it owns four hours of paid leave to get a vaccine (most McDonald’s locations are owned by franchises and not directly by the company). AT&T is mandating vaccines for managers and starting negotiations with unions about a similar rule for other workers. Uber and Lyft are requiring their corporate employees to get vaccinated to return to the office, but they’re not mandating shots for drivers.

Translation: corporations are issuing vaccine mandates for the more highly paid positions, the ones in which they have far more leverage in that the people in those positions have far more to lose if they resign or get fired for failing to get vaccinated, while the lower-paid hourly positions, the ones where employee losses can be far more quickly replaced with people who will require minimal training, and the ones in which people have less to lose if they do not obey a vaccine mandate, don’t get ‘mandated.’

Taylor Farms is in no position to impose a mandate. On average, the company has raised its hourly wage 18% in the past year and a half, with particularly steep raises in competitive labor markets including Florida, Tennessee and Texas. Wages in one location increased 42%, the company said.

He probably shouldn’t have said that last part, as now other Taylor employees will be demanding that 42% raise!

The produce giant’s Tennessee plant competes with Tyson Foods Inc. and General Mills inc. for workers, and is short 180 employees. It cannot afford to alienate any would-be recruits. “We hold a job fair and 10 people show up,” Mr. Taylor said. “Five people take the job and no one shows up on Monday.”

And so it goes. For the most part, employees have the power, not employers. Due to the ridiculous extensions of unemployment, people are being paid enough not to work that there’s no incentive for the minimum skill people to go out and get a job. Then, when you include health care workers who have to be licensed in some way, you have another group of workers who can decline the vaccine and companies have to either accept it, or lose very difficult to replace workers.

It’s already happening. Here in the Bluegrass State, Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) noted:

“To our south, where it always starts, where we can see our future, we are continuing to see state after state not only get very low, but completely run out of [intensive care unit] beds,” Beshear said at the state Capitol. “In Kentucky, our hospital capacity, really the capacity that we have based on the staffing that we have, is reaching a critical point. We are going to be out of hospital capacity very, very soon.”

It seems that our Governor doesn’t have much respect for our Southern brethren!

The governor said 21 hospitals across the commonwealth now face “critical staffing shortages,” as the number of new cases and rate of Kentuckians testing positive for the virus continues to rise. To “allow for additional help,” Beshear said he signed an order on Wednesday that grants licensed health care providers in other states permission to practice on an emergency basis in Kentucky.

How, I have to ask, is President Biden’s executive order — which currently applies only to nursing homes, not hospitals — going to help anything? Kentucky cannot afford to lose a single nurse!

This is what happens when Our Betters decide that they Know Best What’s For Our Own Good; they can never see the big picture, never can see what’s outside of their own little minds. Laughably, Salon’s Amanda Marcotte called forced vaccination opponents “authoritarians” and wrote, in the same article, “The irony of all this is that the best way to make this problem go away is to do the very thing that the anti-vaxxers hate most: Impose as many vaccine mandates as possible, in every way possible.” Sometimes the left can’t even see themselves.