It looks like Bishop John Stowe isn’t the only one threatening his employees with termination if they don’t take the vaccine:

Cheryl Bettigole, MD, from her Twitter biography.

Many Philadelphia health workers remain unvaccinated two months before shots will be required

by Laura McCrystal | Wednesday, August 18, 2021

Acting Health Commissioner Cheryl Bettigole said many institutions have applauded Philadelphia’s new vaccine mandate for health care workers, but noted that many employees remain unvaccinated.

More than a dozen long-term care facilities in Philadelphia have less than 50% of their staff vaccinated, she said.

”If you’re more committed to not getting the vaccine than to the safety of your patients, it’s time to do something else,” she said at a Wednesday news briefing. “Health care is not for you.”

Let’s tell the truth here: health care employees at all levels have been exposed to constant, continuous education and pleas to get vaccinated. If they actually wanted to get vaccinated, they would have by now. One might ask why, in a city which gave 81.44% of its votes has so many unvaccinated people.

Like so many on the left,^[1]Given this tweet of hers, I think there’s sufficient evidence to associate Dr Bettigole with the political left. Dr Bettigole not only knows what’s best for other people, but insists that it’s her way of the highway. The problem with that is that many, who have already resisted the months’ long pressure to take the vaccines, are going to continue to refuse. What will happen to health care facilities in our nation’s sixth largest city if, say, 25% or 35% of the workforce has to be discharged because they have refused to be vaccinated?

Employers across the nation are complaining that they cannot get people to fill job openings, and people working in health care settings aren’t just burger flippers at McDonald’s, who can be trained in short order. It takes two years to train an Associate degree Registered Nurse, four if she is going for her baccalaureate degree. It can take between four and twelve weeks to train a Certified Nursing Assistant. Requirements to become a CNA in Pennsylvania can be found here, requirements which include a criminal background check.`

Registered Nurses are a lot harder to find than CNAs, and there is only so much that Licensed Practical Nurses (LPNs) are allowed to do.

As we have previously noted, of the fifteen city zip codes with the lowest vaccination rate, only two are plurality white; in the other 13, four are plurality Hispanic, and nine are plurality black. Seven of those plurality black zip codes have an over 80% black population.^[2]19131, 19132, 19138, 19139, 19141, 19142, and 19151, including the neighborhoods of Wynnefield, Overbrook, West Philadelphia, North Philadelphia, Strawberry Mansion, West Oak Lane, East Germantown … Continue reading Of the fifteen most heavily vaccinated zip codes, two are plurality white and twelve are absolute majority white. Black Philadelphians have been more vaccine resistant that whites, Asians and Hispanics; if Dr Bettigole carries through with her regulations to fire non-vaccinated health care employees, she will be firing a disproportionate number of black employees.

Tell me just how that’s going to work, will you?

The city will require all health care workers to be vaccinated by Oct. 15, unless they have medical or religious exemptions. Employees and students of higher-education institutions must also be vaccinated, Bettigole announced last week.

The mandate for health-care workers includes employees, contractors, students, and volunteers who work in-person at an organization that provides health-care services. Home health aides and nursing home employees are also included.

Home health aides, huh? Home health aides must pass CNA requirements in Pennsylvania, as well as others. What happens if 10% or 20% decline to be vaccinated? Are the clients they serve simply going to go unserved?

Bettigole said the city hasn’t received much pushback about the mandate, and has “heard from some very happy people.” But officials have also received questions in the last week about health care workers who do not want the vaccine, she said.

”We all know that it is simply unacceptable to take the risk of passing a potentially fatal infection to the patients who come to us for help,” Bettigole said.

As Governor Greg Abbott’s (R-TX) case shows, fully vaccinated persons can contract the virus. Being vaccinated means that, if you contract the virus, you will probably have less serious, and perhaps no, symptoms, but you can still contract the virus; vaccination does not stop a person from passing the virus on to others.

Nursing homes have always had problems keeping people, because, to be blunt about it, they are miserable places to work. Dr Bettigole, however, wants to make it doubly hard, and can a significant percentage of the workers already in such settings. I suppose that she thinks that this will be the ‘stick’ to get the rest of the employees vaccinated, but I have to ask: has she considered that, in an environment where we have been very free about granting eligibility for unemployment compensation, and where many ‘workers’ have chosen not to work because the state and the federal government are paying them not to work, that some of those facilities might just have to close?
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Update! 5:00 PM

Well, that didn’t take long!

AP Source: Biden to require vaccines for nursing home staff

By Zeke Miller | 4:31 PM EDT

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration will require that nursing home staff be vaccinated against COVID-19 as a condition for those facilities to continue receiving federal Medicare and Medicaid funding.

Biden will announce the move Wednesday afternoon in a White House address as the administration continues to look for ways to use mandates to encourage vaccine holdouts to get shots. A senior administration official confirmed the announcement on condition of anonymity to preview the news before Biden’s remarks.

The new mandate, in the form of a forthcoming regulation to be issued by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, could take effect as soon as next month.

Hundreds of thousands of nursing home workers are not vaccinated, according to federal data, despite those facilities bearing the brunt of the early COVID-19 outbreak and their workers being among the first in the country to be eligible for shots.

It comes as the Biden administration seeks to raise the costs for those who have yet to get vaccinated, after months of incentives and giveaways proved to be insufficient to drive tens of millions of Americans to roll up their sleeves.

There’s more at the original.

But the same problems exist: there are a lot of nursing home staffers, RNs, LPNs and CNAs, as well as those who are not involved in direct patient care, who have chosen against the vaccines. President Biden is going to force all nursing homes to mandate vaccination, which means that all nursing homes are going to lose a significant amount of staff.

The more the government tries to force people to do things, the more resistance will be encountered.