To Gov. Hochul: What About ‘Do No Harm’?

February 28, 2022 Albany Times-Union via Associated Press

Share this:

Gov. Kathy Hochul and State Health Commissioner Mary T. Bassett were caught between what you might call a shot and a hard place: Risk a staffing crisis in the health care industry by sidelining workers who haven’t gotten a COVID-19 booster vaccine, or risk those workers infecting patients and colleagues.

Their solution — not to enforce a mandate to get a booster shot by Monday — may be the most realistic solution anyone could have come up with. As of early February almost 240,000 health care workers had not reported getting a booster shot. That was simply too many people to suspend or fire all at once in a health care system that’s already stressed from the pandemic.

But in saying they will reassess the situation in the spring, they’ve effectively launched the state on a three-month experiment in which hundreds of thousands of workers and patients will be the guinea pigs.

Stepping back from all the political noise surrounding the issue of vaccines, it’s extraordinary that New York came to be in this crisis-within-a-crisis at all.

It’s baffling that workers in a health care system that was overwhelmed early in the pandemic because there was no vaccine against COVID-19 have either refused to be vaccinated at all, or for one reason or another won’t get a booster shot.

It’s similarly puzzling to see this level of reluctance in a state that went through such high-profile turmoil over the COVID-19 death rate among nursing home residents. While there were valid questions and criticisms about the Cuomo administration’s handling of the situation and fudging of the data, it’s also been well established that transmission of the virus from staff to patients was a substantial reason for the infections.

The state Health Department says the booster rate as of late last week was 75 percent of the state’s health care workforce, and 88 percent of the direct-care staff in hospitals. Those would be pretty good numbers in the general population, but in a health care system that deals with already-sick, immunocompromised and otherwise vulnerable people, it’s clearly not enough.

We’re well aware that even vaccinated and boosted people can be carriers. But people are simply better protected with them than without them. In health care settings, every precaution matters.

People are free, of course, to gamble with their own health — but not when it could harm those around them. To those health care workers who could get a shot but won’t out of some misplaced sense of personal choice, or freedom, or what have you, we suggest they consider the first principle of medicine: Do no harm. It’s an oath that doctors and many nurses take explicitly when they enter their professions. And for everyone else in the field of caring for the health of other people, it’s surely an implicit promise. Being fully vaccinated is a promise kept.