New guidance from the California Department of Public Health allows hospitals to force asymptomatic but COVID-positive employees back to work — even after California, other states, and the Biden administration have booted unvaccinated health-care workers out of their jobs, prompting severe staffing shortages.
“Hospitals have to exhaust all other options before resorting to this temporary tool,” the state agency wrote in a statement on Saturday. “Facilities and providers using this tool, should have asymptomatic COVID-19 positive workers interact only with COVID-19 positive patients to the extent possible.”
Hospital employees who have COVID but have no symptoms are not required to test negative or self-isolate before returning to care for hospital patients. The move prompted fury from health-care workers’ unions.
In August, California was the first state in the country to issue a vaccine mandate for health-care workers, requiring employees of hospitals, nursing homes, doctors’ offices, and dialysis centers, among others, to be fully dosed by Sept. 30. California expanded its order in September, and again in December when it added a booster shot requirement. Several of California’s big employers in the health-care sector were already terminating workers or suspending them without pay days after the Sept. 30 deadline.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is currently weighing Biden v. Missouri, a case challenging the constitutionality of the Biden administration’s similar vaccine demand for health-care workers.
The disconnect is kill-your-brain-cells obvious: the state of California would rather have COVID-positive people staffing their hospitals than COVID-free people who have objections to the vaccine.
If it wasn’t already clear — from the fact that the vaccine doesn’t prevent COVID transmission or infection — California’s upside-down policies show the real purpose behind vaccine mandates. Their proponents aren’t serious about stopping infections. If they were, they wouldn’t have made exceptions to their own lockdowns for leftist protests or personal vacation time. They wouldn’t have forced COVID-positive patients into nursing homes, or beat residents over the head with ineffective lockdowns and flip-flopping mask mandates.
And they wouldn’t have let their vaccine mandates drive capable health-care workers out of the industry, causing severe staff shortages with the result that “When hospitals are understaffed, people die,” as one source told The New York Times.
No, COVID bureaucrats aren’t pushing unconstitutional vaccine mandates to protect you. They cherish those mandates because they provide more power and a perfect template for forcing you to comply with restrictive government diktats.
If you ended up in the hospital tonight, who would you rather have taking care of you? A nurse who had COVID two months ago, has strong natural immunity, and has religious objections to a vaccine that admittedly doesn’t stop the virus’s spread? Or one who got the jab but came down with COVID this morning anyway?
If you don’t want the anti-logic COVID bullies like California’s health department to make that decision for you, why let them boss you around elsewhere?
