Coast hospitals ‘can’t afford’ to lose nurses, but many front-line workers refuse the vaccine
As the sun set outside of Gulfport Memorial Hospital in early December, just a few days after a Louisiana federal court temporarily blocked a requirement that health-care facilities that participate in Medicare and Medicaid programs have their staff fully vaccinated against COVID-19, a group of triumphant anti-mandate advocates gathered in prayer.
“The southern breeze, it’s our forefathers,” someone shouted as the group, which included a number of nurses and other health-care workers, struggled to light vigil candles.
They thanked God for the court’s decision, for (medical) freedom and prayed for their enemy by default: hospital administrations that would have had to enforce the mandate or risk shutting down with the loss of the federal insurance money.
“I understand the position our CEO is in, I don’t blame him and I pray for him daily, but I don’t feel guilty for standing up for freedom. We can’t afford to do that any longer,” said Angie Stevens, an unvaccinated Memorial nurse who attended the vigil.
Stevens, who administers COVID shots at one of Memorial’s vaccine clinics, is one of a number of Coast nurses prepared to lose their jobs over the mandate, which the U.S. Supreme Court recently upheld.
The high court on Jan. 12 struck down a Biden Administration mandate that applied to large employers of 100 or more workers but left in place a narrower requirement for health-care workers at hospitals and facilities receiving funds from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Now, instead of mandatory COVID vaccinations by a previous Jan. 4, 2022, deadline, unvaccinated health-care employees must have their first dose of the vaccine by Jan. 27, 2022, or risk losing their jobs.
Hospitals have been pleading with vaccine-hesitant Mississippians to get their shots. But they stopped short of enforcing it for front-line workers who fight daily to save the lives of COVID patients.
Some Coast health-care workers, many of whom have seen the sickest of COVID patients, remain hesitant.
More than 63% of Americans are fully vaccinated against the virus. But only 49% of Mississippi residents have their shots, and the southern six counties average about 40% — some of the lowest numbers in the country.
According to a January YouGovAmerica poll, about 53% of Americans support a vaccine mandate for health-care workers, a much higher percentage than the total rate of fully vaccinated South Mississippians.
“The composition of nurses in Mississippi is representative of the demographics of Mississippi. ... In the state of Mississippi there are many nurses that are not vaccinated,” Singing River CEO Lee Bond has said.
The disparity between the numbers is reflected in vaccine messaging across the MS Gulf Coast, where the most prominent public health leaders — ardent supporters of the shots — stop short of backing a mandate for their employees.
For hospital administrations, optics have become complicated amid a unique challenge: Preserve the interests of unvaccinated staff members so as to not risk losing even one nurse during a critical, statewide worker shortage while remaining steadfast in supporting the lifesaving shot at a time when the vaccine-hesitant region continues to fall victim to virus surges and death.
“We are pleased that rationality, logic and humanity are prevailing over political division. While we are in favor of vaccinations, we are not in favor of a mandate,” Bond said in a statement to the Sun Herald after the federal court decision in December allowed Coast health systems to maintain staff and buy time.
Coast health systems again say they’re prepared to lose a significant amount of staff and risk closing down floors or shutting down facilities completely. At the same time, the virus has mutated into the omicron variant, which has now broken positivity records in the region with its outstanding transmissibility rates, filling up hospital beds and burdening an already bare-bones, exhausted workforce.
It’s more than the hospitals can take.
“I’m with our health system, we believe in the vaccine and the research. We’ve seen the benefits of it displayed in our numbers. And so we believe in the vaccine, but don’t believe that it should be mandated,” said Bobbie Ann Sison, a registered nurse and nurse manager at Singing River Health System’s Pascagoula hospital.
Several of her nurses were prepared to leave before the stay was granted. She spoke with the Sun Herald in early December, right after the temporary mandate pause, when the omicron variant was spreading in more populated areas of the country.
“We’re still living in a pattern where every day is kind of a panic. Most days, I have exactly what I need or I’m one nurse short. So every day I still have a panic attack. ... I hope this new variant doesn’t come through like the last few have. I’m not sure how, you know, the nursing field would be able to survive. We’d be inoperable,” she said.
Why won’t nurses get vaccinated?
Top Coast health systems tout vaccination rates higher than local averages. At Memorial Hospital at Gulfport, 75% of its over 5,000 employees are fully vaccinated while under 70% of Singing River Health System’s 3,500 employees have received both shots.
Data proves that workplace mandates have been effective in increasing employee vaccination rates.
“In general, vaccine mandates work,” James Colgrove, a public health professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, told ABC News.
At the end of September, when a vaccination mandate for federal contractors was announced by the Biden administration, Pascagoula-based Ingalls Shipbuilding was around 50% vaccinated, a spokesperson said. In the weeks following the announcement, about 25% of the extremely vaccine-hesitant workforce received their shots.
But much of the 25-40% of Coast health-care workforce that isn’t vaccinated will choose to be terminated over getting their shots. In October, before the CMS mandate was announced, 71% of Memorial Hospital’s employees were vaccinated. As the deadline neared, only about 4% chose to get their shots to bring the current vaccination rate up to 75%.
Singing River saw some increase in its vaccination rates. Fifty-three percent of employees were vaccinated in October, and now the rates are in the 60s.
Ahead of the original, Jan. 4 deadline for staff vaccination, Sision met one-on-one with each staff member to see just how many she’d actually lose. Most of the unvaccinated were ready to face termination, she said.
“I have a couple that just don’t, they don’t believe in vaccines, they believe in more holistic therapies. And then I have some that, they didn’t want to be told that they had to get it. They wanted it to be their decision.”
Sumer Cuevas, a registered nurse on one of Sison’s Pascagoula medical surge floors, said she’s also heard that a leading reason “several” of her coworkers resisted vaccination was because they didn’t want to be required to get the shot.
“From what I hear, it’s not necessarily the vaccines that they’re concerned about. It’s somebody making them take something. I think it’s more of a choice thing,” Cuevas said.
Stevens, and two of the unvaccinated Memorial health-care workers who accompanied her to the December prayer vigil, said they understood the strain their leaving would place on the hospital but still wouldn’t receive their shots.
They cited a lack of testing and natural immunity as reasons they were avoiding vaccination.
“I hope the community realizes that when health-care workers are leaving, forced to leave over mandates, that it will affect the community and the quality of care that they see,” said Katie Baker, an unvaccinated nurse who has been with Memorial for 21 years.
“This does not just affect does it does not just affect Memorial Hospital, Singing River, all the major local hospitals.”
Health officials resist vaccine requirements
Outspoken vaccine advocates like Bond and Memorial at Gulfport Human Resources Director Tony Alves have demonstrated measured diplomacy while fractions of their staff threaten to accept termination instead of receiving the widely researched, lifesaving vaccination.
Aside from vaccine events and providing one-on-one instruction from top medical experts, both Singing River and Memorial in recent weeks have attempted to curb lingering staff vaccine concerns via question-and-answer sessions or sending out trusted literature.
But the hospitals maintain strong opposition to a vaccination mandate. Losing nurses due to the requirement during the critical staffing shortages has taken precedence over getting all of their workforce immunized.
“We are working diligently to combat staffing shortages, and the CMS mandate would have exacerbated the labor strains that we, like so many other health care systems in Mississippi and across the country, are currently experiencing,” Alves told the Sun Herald in December.
Singing River was even prepared to reject the mandate and therefore sustain CMS fines and face removal from key federal insurance programs, putting the entire health system at risk of closure.
The health system said its now ready to comply, however. Memorial and Merit Health Biloxi representatives also said they’re mandating the vaccines because of the CMS rule.
“We believe the vaccine is safe and effective, but we recognize that many of the heroes in Mississippi who have carried us through nearly two years of this pandemic have made the personal decision not to become vaccinated,” Singing River Health System general counsel Jaklyn Wrigley said.
“Although we intend to make every effort to comply with the CMS mandate, we cannot help but be concerned that the mandate will cause us to lose more frontline health-care workers from the state — workers who are already in extremely short supply. Even the loss of one nurse can have a negative impact on the number of patients for whom we are able to deliver care, and the mandate could cause us to lose many more than that.”
Hospitals ‘can’t afford’ to lose nurses to the mandate
Gulf Coast health systems cannot afford to lose even just one more nurse, at risk of shutting down entire floors of their hospitals at a time when the newest COVID variant is moving through the state at record speeds.
They’re not unique in this statewide workforce arms race.
Dr. Jonathan Wilson, chief administrative officer and COVID-19 incident manager at University of Mississippi Medical Center, said during a recent press conference that their system typically had around 70 nurse openings. Now they’re up to 360, “fueled mainly by nurses leaving the profession or lured away during a competitive market.”
Returning to normal staffing levels will take about two to three years, Wilson said. UMMC mandated the vaccine for all its employees and students in July.
“I feel like hospitals are like a fighter with two arms behind our backs, and we’re just getting punched,” he added.
If the mandate is implemented, Pascagoula nurse manager Sison said the hospital would have had to close another one of her two available medical-surgical floors, which are being used during omicron the way ICUs were flooded amid the delta variant.
“And hopefully, we would have been able to sustain that completely,” she said.
Blakeney Obrien, a registered nurse at Singing River’s Pascagoula hospital said that before the mandate halt, discussion of which nurses would stay and which would leave was very common within the hospital. Few pushed the vaccine onto others, she said, most were respectful of each nurses’ stance on the shots.
“Everybody was just trying to figure out what our normal would look like, once that did happen.”
We do have those people that (would leave.) it’s totally up to them. And I admire them for sticking to their beliefs the way they are, for not getting it,” she said.
“I’m proud of the ones that are getting it. Because, you know, we’re sick of seeing COVID. Whatever everybody decides as it is, what they want it to be.”
The increasingly political vaccine has created hostility
On top of administration challenges, the political nature of vaccination has created a tumultuous work environment for nurses on both sides of the issue.
Danielle Cockrell, an unvaccinated Memorial Hospital technician said she feels slighted by hospital administration because the 10 years she’s worked for the health system could be so easily retracted.
“We are being treated as if we are expendable, like, I know, I echo the thoughts of millions of other health-care workers of it, who say this, but last year, we were heroes, and this year, we’re dirty, we’re expendable, we don’t matter,” said Cockrell.
Cockrell claims she’s treated like a “second rate citizen” by patients also because she doesn’t have a vaccine.
“I’ve had a couple of instances where, you know, a patient would treat me differently because Memorial hands out vaccine stickers for people to put on their badges, like a badge of honor-type thing,” said Cockrell, who isn’t vaccinated and does not wear a vaccine sticker.
Angie Stevens, the unvaccinated nurse at Memorial, said she’s asked daily at the vaccine clinic she works in whether she’s received her shot.
“It’s uncomfortable because, I mean, that’s my personal opinion. That’s not right,” she said. “If I feel comfortable with them, I say no, for me, I choose not to get it.”
Nurse and manager Jessica Moore, who coordinates staff and care at Singing River’s Gulfport location, agreed that some in the unvaccinated community have become hostile since the vaccine rollout.
“We have people out there on Fourth of July partying, without vaccines, and then they’re sick a few days later and coming in,” one nurse said. “And they’re expecting us to still take care of them, despite us begging the community and offering shots and offering vaccines and offering education and imploring them to wear the masks, imploring them to take care of themselves and maintain social distance.”
“We were heroes during the first wave. And then the second and the third we became enemies,” she said.
