Houston, TX Hospital System To Fire Employees Who Refuse COVID-19 Vaccination

Houston Methodist Hospital, a not-for-profit 8-hospital system – 4 of which are ANCC Nursing Magnet status accredited – and academic medical center, with over 2502 beds in the Houston, Texas metro area, has publicly announced that they will fire any employee who refuses to get a COVID-19 vaccination.

The Houston Press and Houston Chronicle reported today, Thursday, 22 April 2021, that Bob Nevens, the hospital chain’s Director of Corporate Risk and Insurance, and Jennifer Bridges, a Houston Methodist Registered Nurse at the system’s Baytown facility, are on schedule to be fired soon if they don’t comply by obtaining a COVID-19 vaccine within the hospital system’s deadline of June 7, 2021.

Dr. Marc L. Boom, MD, the hospital system’s CEO, had the idea to require all employees to get vaccinated against COVID-19 in order to keep their jobs, and offered $500 incentive bonuses to any employee who demonstrated proof of vaccination. Houston Methodist was the first hospital system nationally to make COVID-19 vaccination mandatory for employees.

Houston Methodist Hospital

And to this point, a clear majority – 84% – of the hospital system’s 26,000 employees have received at least 1 COVID-19 vaccine dose as of Tuesday this week, according to Houston Methodist’s Director of Public Relations Stefanie Asin.

Houston Methodist’s Human Resources Department has stated that the hospital system will consider requests from employees who don’t want to be vaccinated for medical or for religious reasons.

However, neither Mr. Nevens nor Nurse Bridges are refusing COVID vaccination on those grounds. And neither Mr. Nevens, who is a 10-year hospital system employee, nor Nurse Bridges, who is a 7-year employee, consider themselves “anti-vaxxers,” and both have for many years received the annual influenza vaccine.

Mr. Nevens and Nurse Bridges have both said that their reluctance to receive COVID-19 vaccinations arises fromtheir concerns with the vaccines’ emergency approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, rather than the more well-known and much lengthier standard, traditional, and much more well-known approval process.

Nurse Bridges said that as a Registered Nurse, “I’ve taken every vaccine you’re ever supposed to take. We just want more research. And we want it to be FDA-approved before we inject it into our bodies, you know, because of course, once you put it in, you can’t take it back out. There’s no long-term research on it at all, so a lot of us are just kind of leery.”

Mr. Nevens is of the opinion that “there’s not enough data for it, and I just didn’t like the idea of being forced to take something that’s not licensed and approved by the FDA.”

However, public law and administrative policy and procedure – which includes ethical concerns – specifically make exceptions for approval to more technical and lengthy requirements that by shortening, do not place public health at risk during a public health emergency when time is of critical importance. And so, for that reason, and others, emergency use authorization is genuinely a legitimate form of FDA approval according to the FDA, according to Houston Methodist, and according to vaccinologists, even though emergency use authorization is only very infrequently used, which may account for reluctance by some.

Included with every COVID-19 vaccine fact sheet is information from the FDA which states that, although the COVID-19 vaccines have not gone through the FDA’s typical better-known approval process, the agency approved their widespread use because of the numerous months and months of research conducted on the vaccines as they were being developed, which led the agency to believe “that the known and potential benefits of the product outweigh the known and potential risks of the product” because of the severity of the pandemic.

And since the initial trials on the COVID-19 vaccines were begun, millions upon millions more U.S. residents have been vaccinated without any notable life-threatening side effects occurring, with the minimally minor exception of the six women out of 6.8 million recipients of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine who, for unknown reasons, experienced rare blood clots. That discovery prompted the FDA to recommend pausing its use in order to conduct even more research to determine whether, or not, the clotting they experienced was related to the vaccine.

Mr. Nevens told the Houston Press that he’s scheduled to be fired by the end of April because he has refused to be vaccinated by the hospital’s April 15 deadline for manager-level employees. When he refused, he was placed on a 2-week unpaid suspension.

Nurse Bridges said she has not made plans to receive any coronavirus vaccine before the June 7 deadline, and has been circulating a printed petition within the hospital system in an attempt to raise support from among colleagues and the public to petition the CEO and hospital system administration to reconsider the mandate.

About a week ago, top-level hospital executives asked Nurse Bridges to stop distributing the petition, but she refused, and instead, requested a meeting with CEO Boom to see if she could convince him to change his mind about the vaccine policy.

While she never heard from CEO Boom, the next day, he circulated an email to all hospital system employees informing them that the final deadline date for COVID-19 vaccination was June 7, 2021. In it, he also wrote in part that, “Requiring mandatory vaccinations isn’t just about safety. It’s also about being examples for those who are hesitant to get vaccinated.”

Mr. Nevens said that he understands CEO Boom’s perspective when he wrote the email that hospital employees need to lead by example by becoming vaccinated. However, he just doesn’t feel comfortable receiving an injection, and said, “You know, there’s 90% of me that agrees with that.”

He also added the caveat that he still believes Houston Methodist’s decision to mandate receiving COVID-19 vaccination while the vaccines are still under emergency use authorization “is a tough pill to swallow.”

And since that time, Nurse Bridges has established a separate online petition which, to date, has received 2300 signatures from community members who oppose Houston Methodist’s mandatory COVID-19 vaccine requirement.

And, not to be outdone, she’s also reached out for help to Texans For Vaccine Choice, a group which is allegedly not anti-vaccine, but opposes the hospital system’s unchallenged mandatory policy based upon what they call “vaccine choice.”

However, that group has posted several false and misleading social media posts mistakenly and falsely claiming that some deaths have occurred among vaccine recipients which are directly attributable to them having received the vaccine, despite the absence of any substantiating evidence or facts to support their false allegations. And further, in years past, the group has lobbied against making any vaccines mandatory for students in Texas public schools.

Perhaps more substantially, when Nurse Bridgs contacted Texas Senator Ted Cruz’ office about the matter, she said that the staff member with whom she spoke “was appalled” when she was told about Houston Methodist’s mandatory vaccine requirement, and said they would be working “to see what they can do.”

Nurse Bridges said that she’s been told by some of her coworkers that they’re planning to quit in protest before the hospital system’s June 7th vaccine administration deadline, while others have said that they’re planning on waiting until the last minute to get vaccinated, just so they can keep their jobs.

Again, most Houston Methodist employees – 84% – have already obtained vaccinations, and Teal Riley, the Nurse Manager of the COVID-19 ICU, is one of them. She received her vaccination in December, and said, “I was one of the first ones in line.”

She, and the team of hundreds of RNs whom she oversees have had an unenviable front-row seat to the human suffering and death caused by the coronavirus during the pandemic public health crisis, which explains why she was eager to become vaccinated.

Having seen “very ill, very sickly” patients suffering with COVID-19, who were previously some seemingly healthy folks as young as 21 and 24 years old who then “eventually need a lung transplant” because of the disease, was stunning. “We have patients who have been here in the hospital from 2 to 3, [days] up to 70 or 80 days. Everybody’s recovery is so different,” she said.

But Nurse Manager Riley said that COVID-19 ICU patients aren’t the only ones she’s seen suffer, and said that the disease has taken a personal toll in her life, as well. “I had an uncle pass away from COVID within five days of getting diagnosed. He was just 61 years old,” she said.

Mr. Nevens said that he hopes the Texas State Legislature will pass House Bill 1687, co-sponsored by Republican Representatives Steve Toth – District 15, and Candy Noble – District 89, which would make it illegal for employers to require their workers to take the COVID-19 vaccine.

Riley said that before getting her first vaccine dose, “I went in and did my own research. I went to Pfizer’s website, I did literature reviews, just to read up on it. I looked at the case studies and everything to get my own sense of confidence. I wanted to see the raw data on what the outcomes were going to be, and that was enough to satisfy me,” she said.

When asked about her colleagues that don’t feel comfortable taking the vaccine, Riley said she believes “Everybody has their own opinion. [But] I do wish that they would reconsider.”

To her, “The benefit of getting this immunization, this vaccination, is so much better than the risk of getting COVID and what the possible outcome could be.”

“When you’re going into healthcare, this is what you sign up for,” Riley said.

It’s quite obvious that not everyone agrees.

Quentin Brogdon, a Dallas-based Founding Attorney-Partner of the firm Crain, Brodgon, Rogers, with over 30 years experience, was aked if employers could require their employees to take the vaccine. He said that “it appears, based on some guidance from the EEOC – the Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission – that employers can require their employees to be vaccinated against COVID, particularly in high-risk occupations – if the employees work in a hospital or nursing home, for example. But even in a white-collar job where the employee isn’t necessarily coming into contact with the public, it appears based on that federal guidance that an employer can require, if they choose, to have an employee be vaccinated against COVID.”

He also said that, “there are, fortunately, exceptions under the federal law if the employee has a sincerely held religious belief that prevents them from getting vaccinated or the employee has a disability under the Americans With Disabilities Act that would make the employee more susceptible to an adverse side effect from the vaccine. Then the employer has a duty under federal law to make reasonable accommodations for the employee. That might include, for example, allowing the employee to work from home – telecommute, in essence, what we used to call it. Now it’s becoming more the norm for many employees, accommodations of the employee to work around the disability or the sincerely held religious [belief].”