As Springfield hospitals struggle, Parson suggests health leaders playing blame game

As Springfield hospitals treat a growing wave of COVID-19 patients, Gov. Mike Parson on Tuesday implicitly attacked one of the city’s major hospital operators for announcing that it will require its employees to be vaccinated.

Health officials and hospital leaders are begging people to get vaccinated and warning that the highly-contagious delta variant is overwhelming Springfield’s hospitals. The facilities are caring for the most COVID patients ever and city officials have canceled a major upcoming festival because of the spreading variant.

But the Republican governor said COVID messaging coming from southwest Missouri amounted to a blame game. He warned health officials against scaring residents into getting vaccinated.

The remarks came after Mercy, which operates facilities across the region, announced last week it would mandate vaccinations for workers by late September.

“We just need to make sure that people are not scared thinking they’re doing something wrong going to a hospital. And I think the message you’re seeing out of southwest Missouri is more people just trying to blame somebody for this virus. The virus itself is to blame,” said Parson, in Kansas City for a ceremonial signing of the bill raising the state’s gasoline tax.

“We just got to figure out how we deal with it and I think health care, especially health care leaders, really need to be encouraging people the importance of the vaccine,” Parson said, “instead of trying to force people to take a vaccine or literally just scare them into taking a vaccine because we know that doesn’t work.”

Mercy was treating 134 COVID-19 patients on Monday. CoxHealth, Springfield’s other major hospital, had 125.

A Mercy spokeswoman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. John Mohart, Mercy senior vice president of clinical services, said last week “vaccination is key to saving lives.”

COVID cases are surging in Missouri. The 7-day rolling average of new daily cases has risen from 372 a month ago to 904. The average in Greene County, home of Springfield, increased from 79 to 165 over the same period.

“This surge in the spread of the virus has placed extreme strain on our health care system,” Katie Towns, acting director of the Springfield-Greene County Health Department told the city council on Monday.

Springfield on Monday announced it had canceled the Birthplace of Route 66 Festival that was scheduled for mid-August over COVID concerns.

“With our region’s low vaccination rate against COVID-19, the resulting surge of infections are overwhelming our hospitals and making our community sick. We feel it is just not safe to bring tens of thousands of people from all over the world to this community for any reason,” Cora Scott, the city’s director of public information and civic engagement, said in a statement.

Parson said last week that Missouri’s health care system remains stable. Asked on Tuesday about the basis for his statement, given the problems in Springfield, the governor said officials examine data every day and are in discussions with the Missouri Hospital Association.

He emphasized that 55% of the population has received at least one dose, “which helps us with that.” That figure counts only individuals 18 and older, according to data from the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services.

In total, 45.4% of the overall population has initiated vaccination and 39.8% has completed it. Parson said counting children in the vaccination figures “is what some of them will do to just give you lower numbers to make the situation sound worse than it really is.”

Missouri has the 12th-lowest vaccination rate among adults of any state, according to data compiled by The New York Times. Vaccinations are also distributed unevenly across the state, meaning that some areas are much more susceptible to serious outbreaks than others.

For instance, in Taney County, home of Branson, just 33% of adults are fully vaccinated. It’s currently in the top 10 counties in the country for new cases per person, according to The Times.

Still, Parson said Missouri is “not in crisis mode” — a phrase he also used last week.

“We understand that this virus is out there,” Parson said. “We knew that this was going to take place when we knew the vast majority of people in this state -- not the vast majority, I’m sorry, but a large number of them -- will not take the vaccine right now.”