L&C: About Hospital Workers Who Are Opposed to the Covid Vaccines

This headline was striking recently.

NYT: A Hospital Finds an Unlikely Group Opposing Vaccination: Its Workers, subtitled, “When a Staten Island hospital implemented a vaccine or testing mandate, some of its staff staged angry protests.”

If even hospital workers are opposed to the vaccine, doesn’t that support the anti-vaxxers who think there’s something wrong with it?

I have an insight that might explain this, based on my recent hospital experience. Among the many tests I had in the hospital, some of which continue to this day via clinic outpatient visits, was a weekly echocardiogram. Each time I have the procedure, the technician who does it is usually different. So I have chatted with a lot of them. One was a woman who said she was on her third career. Her first was working 14 years as an airline attendant. At some point in her life she decided to do something different–so she got a degree in echocardiography and now has her present job.

(There were technicians for numerous procedures, I gathered, who were licensed to perform one particular procedure, and that’s all they did all day. The guy who installed my Picc Line was another. And a photo in the article is of a “CT scan technician.”)

The point is that her “degree” was in no way a medical degree, as an M.D., R.N., or N.P. would have. (Here’s an example curriculum.) So I can easily imagine many hospital staff who are certified to perform one or another procedure without having any thorough medical training that might include how vaccines work, or how they are tested. Not to mention the janitorial and service staff, who also presumably count as hospital workers. They’re all as subject to propaganda and misinformation as anyone who doesn’t work in a hospital.