More than 175 workers at a Houston hospital system have been suspended for refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccinations, but one nurse there says their story is not getting through.
Dr. Marc Boom, chief executive officer at Houston Methodist Hospital, last month mandated that all employees take the vaccine by June 7. If they don’t, they face suspensions and even termination.
“We are nearly 100% compliant with our COVID-19 vaccine mandate,” Boom said in an email to staffers on Tuesday, according to USA Today. “Houston Methodist is officially the first hospital system in the country to achieve this goal for the benefit of its patients.”
But nearly 200 workers haven’t agreed to take the vaccine. “I wish the number could be zero, but unfortunately, a small number of individuals have decided not to put their patients first,” Boom said.
That’s not how Lorri Curto, a former nurse at the hospital, sees it. She says she is one of 117 former employees who have filed suit over the facility’s mandate.
“I am a Master’s educated Registered Nurse with 34 years of experience,” Curto wrote in an email to The Daily Wire. “As one of the 117 former employees of Houston Methodist Hospital (HMH) who are named in the current lawsuit, I read your articles on The Daily Wire with interest.”
The Daily Wire covered the hospital’s suspension of employees and addressed the issue of employer mandates of vaccines in an op-ed.
“I had a number of interchanges with Dr. Boom regarding Methodist’s plan to make the Covid Vaccine mandatory in the months leading up to the mandate and there are several points that I feel need to be made when covering this story,” Curto said. “First, many of us who have been fired are not anti-vax people as we are being portrayed by Dr. Boom and the news media. If the Covid vaccine had been fully vetted by the FDA, my hesitation would have been significantly decreased.”
The lawsuit noted that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not fully approved the vaccines, instead only issuing emergency use authorizations (EUA). The CDC’s guidance on the vaccines describes them as “safe and effective,” citing evaluations of “tens of thousands of participants in clinical trials”:
Over 302 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been given in the United States from December 14, 2020, through June 7, 2021. COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective. COVID-19 vaccines were evaluated in tens of thousands of participants in clinical trials. The vaccines met the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) rigorous scientific standards for safety, effectiveness, and manufacturing quality needed to support emergency use authorization (EUA).
The workers allege the hospital is “illegally requiring its employees to be injected with an experimental vaccine as a condition of employment.” Curto said she was informed about the vaccine requirement in May, but told her supervisor she wouldn’t be taking it. She said she soon received papers that said “your employment is terminated June 7.”
“Dr. Boom has repeatedly compared the situation to when HMH mandated the flu vaccine and nobody in the media wants to confront him with the fact that he is comparing apples to oranges,” Curto said. “The flu vaccine has had decades of evidence supporting its use, not months, and it has received full approval from the FDA. Dr. Boom consistently wants to frame the question as ‘putting patients first,’ which again is not accurate. If it was truly about putting patients first, people would have been checked for antibodies prior to receiving any vaccine. His claim that the employees who have taken the vaccine have done so in order to ‘keep patients at the center’ is also patently untrue.”
“HMH started vaccinating employees in December 2020 and when people weren’t lining up to get it fast enough, HMH then offered a $500 incentive to employees to take the vaccine,” said Curto, suggesting that the motivation to get the vaccine by employees was really about keeping their jobs. “I would appreciate it if someone in the media would recognize and publicize how Dr. Boom and those like him have manipulated the language in this conversation,” Curto asserted.
“Houston Methodist went from volunteer to incentivize to coercion very quickly. In fact ‘very quickly’ describes everything about the Covid-19 vaccine. THAT is the problem!” Curto wrote.
Despite the unprecedented speed of the vaccines’ production, the CDC maintains that they have proven to be safe and assures the public that the vaccines are undergoing “the most intensive safety monitoring in U.S. history”:
Millions of people in the United States have received COVID-19 vaccines since they were authorized for emergency use by FDA. These vaccines have undergone and will continue to undergo the most intensive safety monitoring in U.S. history. This monitoring includes using both established and new safety monitoring systems to make sure that COVID-19 vaccines are safe.