Common sense is beginning to return to some politics in British Columbia as city Mayor’s call on the province to drop the health care worker Covid-19 vaccine mandates.
Merritt Mayor Michael Goetz said with 80,000 vehicles a day passing by Merritt on the Coquihalla Highway, “there’s always going to be an incident somewhere along the way where somebody may have to go to the hospital. And if the ER is closed, they have to go to Kamloops or Kelowna.”
The province has experienced shortages in the getting worse and more exposed during the pandemic. But in the last 12 months since the BC NDP started imposing Covid-19 vaccine mandates on health care workers the system has collapsed. Several ER’s closing almost on the daily and long wait times for everything health care. Some ER are experiencing 25% of their time closed when they should be open.
Goetz is one of the 37 mayors that make up the B.C. Rural Health Care Alliance, a group that seeks to speak with one voice to the Health Ministry in order to pressure it to find solutions to the healthcare shortages, according to Vancouver Sun.
Goetz said that one of the first questions made during a conference call with regional mayors and officials of the Interior Health Authority on Monday was, “Can we look lifting the vaccine (mandate) for nurses?”
Health care worker Covid-19 vaccine mandates have been dropped all across Canada, British Columbia remains one of the hold outs with Nova Scotia. The BC NDP isn’t jut imposing Covid-19 vaccine mandates on health care workers its also imposing them on all B.C. Public Service employees, contractors and volunteers.
The Health Minister doesn’t care about all the vaccine injuries being reported and tens of thousands submitted to Canada’s vaccine injury program and doesn’t want to take into account individuals risk. In January 2022, BC Rise reported Dr. Bonnie Henry releasing a data table of individuals risk factors broken in to groups from age to sex and zero to multiple underlaying medical conditions.
Health Minister Adrian Dix has fully embraced the illogical authoritarian mandatory Covid-19 vaccine policy saying the policy remains and there’s no debate. Dix has enjoyed the luxury of going unchallenged by legacy media, they fail to ask the Health Minister to provide the “science” and support evidence to back up the Covid-19 vaccine mandates.
Still to this day Dix has not provided any supporting scientific evidence that unvaccinated health care workers put patients at any greater risk than the so-called “fully vaccinated” like he claimed on a CTV interview.
According to the Ministry of Health, about 2,500 hospital employees have been sacked for not having had a COVID-19 vaccination. Nearly half of them were employed by the Interior and Northern health authorities, where ongoing emergency department closures have been caused by a lack of staff.
Health Minister Adrian Dix claimed the vaccine mandate is not the problem because all the unvaccinated health care workers were fired and the issue is the Covid-19 vaccines don’t do what the province advertised, they don’t “stop the spread” of Covid-19 accurately pointing to the fact its “fully vaccinated” health care workers that are off sick.
“The issue on health-care staffing challenges is COVID-19, it’s not the mandate,” he said, explaining that staffing shortages are primarily due to people not coming into work when they’re sick. Dix said that 99 per cent of full-time health care workers have been vaccinated for COVID-19, so the number unable to work because they’re unvaccinated is relatively small.
“This was a full-blown hospital when I moved here in 1977. We had two surgeons, we had seven or eight doctors, it was fully staffed, you could have your surgeries here, you could have babies here. This isn’t a mythical thing that we are talking about — this has been done in the past. And centralization has been an absolute disaster,” stated Goetz.
B.C. Liberal health care critic Shirley Bond said it’s time for the province to lift the vaccine mandates for health workers.
“We’ve looked across the country, British Columbia is certainly standing on its own,” she said. “There should be a very significant conversation about what a pathway back to employment looks like in British Columbia,” for unvaccinated health workers.
Adrian Dix plans to try and attract international students and health care workers from other countries to replace Canadian health care workers that are already here and ready to get back to work but sidelined.
Elkford Mayor Steve Fairbairn said it’s “immoral” to be poaching health care workers from other countries to shore up this country’s health system. Instead, the province should focus on removing the barriers for Canadians to train as health-care workers, he said, according to Vancouver Sun.
BC Rise reached out to Health Minister Adrian Dix for an explanation and transparency into the “science” they claim to be following to impose the Covid-19 vaccine mandates.
Questions BC Rise asked Health Minister Adrian Dix regarding the health care worker covid-19 vaccine mandate
You and David Eby announced spending taxpayer money on non residents and non taxpayers to train and upgrade nurses.
The Covid-19 lessons learned review concluded the government and PHO have repeatedly failed to provide rationale and “the why” a decision was made.
The explanations provided for PHO guidance were insufficient. “There was little effort to explain apparently inconsistent public health measures.” the report found.
“Even some people inside the health-care system told us that they did not understand why some decisions had been made.”
According to Bonnie Henry when the Covid-19 vaccine mandate came into effect for healthcare workers, the healthcare system was projected to lose 4,000 fully trained and competent health care workers. These workers keep asking the government to let them work but they are being sidelined from the government because of exercising their rights to either use their freedom of choice and not be injected with the Covid-19 vaccine or simply value rights to personal medical information privacy and disagree with vaccine passports.
What is the real number of healthcare workers fired, laid off because of the mandates. Many also quit using the reason of “retired” instead of outing themselves as not vaccinated or just pro privacy. How many of them actually quit because of the mandate and not because they wanted to retire?
Provinces across the country (most notably Alberta) have opened back up and welcomed back all the Covid-19 “unvaccinated” and presumed “unvaccinated” health care workers while the same has been seen across the world in many other nations including our neighbours at the southern border.
The public (British Columbian residents) are wondering what is the difference between “the science” in BC and everywhere else.
The launch of the Covid-19 vaccine was advertised as “B.C. launches proof of vaccination to stop spread of COVID-19”.
Source: https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2021HLTH0053-001659
What is the actual goal of the Covid-19 vaccine mandate and is there any data to support the mandate to achieve said goal?
Does the goal of the Covid-19 vaccine mandate even make sense or is it a solution looking for a problem?
Secondly, the foreign students and nurses that need to do the courses from ground zero or the ones looking to upgrade. Why is B.C. spending taxpayer money on them instead of investing in our own healthcare workers that may want to upgrade or high school graduates looking to continue post secondary education to work in the healthcare industry?
Something kind of related and poses the same questions is BC Public services Covid-19 vaccine mandate for all employees, contractors and volunteers. People using the services do not need to be Covid-19 vaccinated but the ones operating it do. How does this make any sense?
One thing that also needs to be kept in mind is Dr. Bonnie Henry neglected to inform British Columbians of the risks of the Covid19 vaccine and did not inform residents of the deaths and other vaccine injuries racking up for BC residents. FOI requests revealed she knew a long time ago via other doctors sending her emails to report vaccine injuries.
Dr. Bonnie Henry said at a media available conference she has no patience for health care workers that don’t get the covid-19 shot and made the exemption rules extremely narrow. There’s 100% no tolerance in healthcare but the policy is muddy with BC Public Services but it also still has vaccine mandates for workers, contractors and volunteers.
Below is a screen shot of the letter we sent to Health Minister Adrian Dix.