State public health officials issued a vaccination mandate Thursday for health care workers across the state, requiring them to be fully vaccinated or receive their second dose by the end of September.
The mandate will apply to all workers in health care settings like hospitals and skilled nursing facilities. In its Aug. 5 order, the California Department of Public Health also mandated that people visiting a health care setting must confirm their vaccination status or have tested “As we continue to see an increase in cases and hospitalizations due to the Delta variant of COVID-19, it's important that we protect the vulnerable patients in these settings,” state Public Health Director Dr. Tomas Aragon said in a statement. “Today's action will also ensure that health care workers themselves are protected.”
The new mandate comes just over a week after Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered all state employees and health care workers to show proof they are fully vaccinated or be subject to COVID-19 testing twice weekly for acute health care and long-term care facilities and once weekly for other health care settings.
The testing requirement will still be in place for health care workers who have a documented exemption for medical or religious reasons. The state public health order does not leave room as Newsom's order did for workers who decline to get vaccinated because of personal preference.
Public health officials argued the stricter vaccine mandate is necessary going forward as a higher proportion of COVID-19 infections continue to be confirmed in unvaccinated people.
In a statement, the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers threw its support behind the vaccination mandate, but also urged state officials to consider granting hazard pay bonuses to health care workers as they face another surge in cases and hospitalizations.
“Given our unique and indispensable role and with hospitalizations dramatically rising, including for young children, we understand why frontline healthcare workers are being required to rise again to the occasion and be the first line of defense in this unprecedented fight,” the SEIU-UHW said in its statement.
dont these people have a union
if a strike was in order, this would be it
The government owns your body. The Covid-19 scare makes that crystal clear.
The government is too big. It can ignore We The People with impunity now — and if anyone thinks they can cite the Bill of Rights for redress, the same Big Government can and will bitch-slap them into submission without a second thought. This gov’t regards the Constitution as an amusing anachronism that’s becoming less and less relevant, and soon it won’t matter at all.
I’ve resisted the jab so far because I don’t want or need protection from a virus that’s fatal to less than one person in a million. Seasonal flu kills a higher percentage of the population than the Covid virus, but we aren’t threatened with losing our job, or being put on the No-Fly list if we don’t give in to the government’s order to submit, and take the jab.
We ignored one critical lesson that the country’s founders tried their best to impress on us: ALL governments are EVIL. No exceptions. But governments are necessary, since anarchy doesn’t work. It never benefits the people, and it always degenerates into a totalitarian dictatorship.
So, what’s the answer? Is there an answer?
Yes. The answer requires keeping the government small, and limited to our basic needs. Locally, people can take care of business; they don’t need a government colossus to micromanage their daily lives — and the taxes saved would raise everyone’s living standard.
If a government is small, its evil can be controlled. But when gov’t grows beyond a certain per capita size, the people lose control — and the government begins to control the people.
Our country passed that point decades ago.
It’s even worse than most folks think because we’re forced to pay for redundant governments: a state gov’t that’s larded with bureaucrats, in addition to an overarching federal monstrosity that has its own army of bureaucrats, and each one assumes the other’s responsibilities.
For example, every state has its own version of the EPA, with the same general responsibilities as the national EPA. There are exceptions, such as federal oversight of shared air and water quality regulations. But for the most part every state EPA does more or less the same thing as the federal EPA.
and the federal government has it’s own EPA. The state’s EPA is composed of a bureaucratic rank and file bureaucratic regiment that administers and enforces the state’s enviro rules and regulations in concert with the federal EPA, which employs it’s own regiment of drones doing the same kind of enviro work.
Taxpayers are forced to pay for both.
Such redundancy is seen in many areas of government. It is über-expensive, and with a few exceptions, entirely unneccessary. And considering the current size of our bloated state and federal governments, imagine trying to consolidate those two fiefdoms. Sisyphus would have been an incurable optimist if he thought that would easy, or even doable, with the egos of the electeds baked into the same cake, with the two drone armies desperately grasping at the electeds’ lapels and begging, cajoling, threatening, and whining about how essential their jobs are.
Truth be told, they’d be terrified at the prospect of having to compete in the private sector, where pay and performance are inextricably linked: each one on a side of the same employment coin.
By using two governments the bureaucracy has made an end-run around competition. That competition benefited the folks who pay the freight — the taxpayers. So now the taxpayers pay for redundant services performed by workers who receive substantially higher wages and benefits than private sector workers who do the same type of work. In addition, public employees have much greater job security. Has anyone ever heard about mass layoffs of government bureaucrats?
It’s probably too late in the game to rein in this enormous government. We’ve passed the point of no return because we didn’t heed the warnings of folks who, in many cases, lost everything fighting to create a government that served the people, rather than the other way around.
We are fast approaching the final stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission.
~ Ayn Rand
The question should we should really be asking is why are we injecting kids down to the age of 12 with a new, never tried before, vaccine authorized under an emergency order when that population of kids aren’t at risk of any emergency and are more likely to die of the flu than covid? Same question goes for the mask nonsense. Does this mean we expect kids to wear masks for the rest of their lives?
Ok steven
“The FAITH that so many people have in Government is SO misplaced…” — John Galt
California’s great contribution to political science has been in the lessons it has, as history’s most blessed place, been positioned to share with others for the last six decades. Gifted with great climate, natural beauty, great shipping centers, and a healthy, educated population, California has carved-out two diametrically opposite paths, one traveled by its citizens, the other by its government.
From its citizens arose the world’s capital of entertainment, aviation, agriculture, electronics, and computer technology, as well as some of the best offerings for tourists and outdoor adventurers.
From its government came mismanaged resources (water and timber), neglected infrastructure, rotten schools, high taxes, bloated bureaucracies, and, famously, lunatic policies and arrogant policy-makers.
To put it another way, the state started the 60’s on third base and is today about to be called out at first. This is the lesson of trusting the government to do good, a trust never earned but conferred by a population otherwise occupied by capitalizing on the state’s natural gifts. Things were good enough, long enough, for absolute scumbags (like Gavin Newsom) to sneak into power (with the help of the corrupt media).
What is needed are gallows and plenty of them. Political malfeasance, corruption, and incompetence are crimes against the state, and they have killed more hope and hurt more people than has any virus, earthquake, or raging fire. This state should be a jewel and its citizens sparkling, the envy — not the laughingstock — of the world. Let’s get on with the court trials and carpentry.