If vaccine-refusers are 'ignorant', why do thousands of healthcare workers number among them?

“How many people are we going to kill if we keep following this narrative?”

Those opposed to COVID shots are routinely derided as ignorant, selfish, stupid, and even evil – even as the number of healthcare workers (including those with intimate, first-hand experience of coronavirus) who are speaking out against vaccine mandates continues to rise.This phenomenon has been observed in a number of studies, including one conducted by researchers from the Delphi Group at Carnegie Mellon University, which found that 20.5% of medical assistants, emergency medical technicians and home health, nursing, psychiatric or personal-care aides, were personally opposed to COVID vaccination.With vaccine mandates either in force or looming, many healthcare workers have either resigned or lost their jobs, ending decades-long careers amid disappointment and disillusion.One such doctor is Dr. Rochagné Kilian who works in the emergency room of a hospital in Owen Sound, Ontario. Dr. Kilian recently participated in an online “town hall” meeting hosted by Gary Sims, President and CEO of Grey Bruce Health Services Hospital in Ontario, Canada. The discussion was focused on staff and vaccine mandates.Sims talked about how the “unvaccinated” were filling hospital beds and expressed his concern that more “pediatric” beds would be needed soon, because most children are not vaccinated.Dr. Kilian asked Sims for data to back up his statement and was told that the data was “private.” In an interview she later gave to the Iron Will show, Dr. Kilian disputed Sims’ narrative, revealing that around eighty percent of the patients she was seeing in the ER were “double-vaxxed.”“How many people are we going to kill if we keep following this narrative?” she asked.Dr. Mollie James is an ICU doctor – or rather, she was, until she resigned in protest against vaccine mandates.“I’m pushing back because hospitals have an absolute commitment to follow the data,” she told Realclearpolitics. “Ignoring natural immunity in a vaccine discussion is just criminal. A lot of people who are opposed to the mandates, or who aren’t interested in a vaccine, are in my situation where we got sick taking care of patients. We have natural immunity which has been shown to be broad and enduring – actually, that has put us at a higher risk for having the vaccine. I took care of a patient who had an infection. He waited the 90 days which is recommended to get the vaccine, and he showed up in my ICU 24 hours later with a cardiac arrest. So I have personally seen the implications of having a vaccine after a natural infection and I’m just not interested in that.”John Matland, from New York, is – or rather was – a longtime CAT-scan technologist who worked with coronavirus patients for months during the hardest days of the epidemic.“I’m not an anti-vaxxer. I’ve had the flu shot,” he told the National Review. “For me, it’s specifically the darkness and the silence around the information that’s emerging about these vaccines, and the way that it’s not discussed – not in the media, and not by some doctors.”He also noted his concerns about myocarditis and pericarditis as a result of vaccination, as well as antibody-dependent enhancement (a condition where antibodies produced after an infection or a vaccination actually enhance a disease). ADE is especially relevant to healthcare workers due to their constant exposure to the coronavirus and the fact that so many of them have contracted the virus in the past.Matland has now been banished from the hospital where he used to work, due to his activism against COVID vaccine mandates. He particularly objected to his hospital’s decision to implement mandatory testing for all its unvaccinated staff – even though, as he pointed out, vaccinated people can also carry COVID and infect others.Hospital directors were “trying to punish us … [by] creating a physical stimulus that is not comfortable to coerce us to get vaccinated,” he said. He opened a nationwide online chat for other unvaccinated healthcare workers, which now has over 1,100 members.“I personally know people that have had negative, life-altering reactions to this vaccine and my heart breaks for them,” he wrote to his former CEO.He is one of tens of thousands who now find themselves either fired, suspended, or waiting to discover their fate.Meanwhile, many hospitals are now considering suspending elective procedures due to staff shortages.En español aquí