One flu over the cuckoo’s nest
Nurses say no to vaccine
On Friday, a judge directed New York state health officials to temporarily freeze a mandatory vaccination program for seasonal and swine flu. The order resulted from a lawsuit filed by three nurses who claimed the vaccination order was a violation of their civil rights.
Is it?
In one sense, the problem for New York State – the only state to embrace mandatory vaccination for health care workers – has more to do with timing than with civil rights. The swine flu vaccine has led to increased interest in the anti-vaccination movement, which had previously been confined to relatively few people and health professionals.
Concerns swirl around suspected side-effects of vaccines that afflict a relatively small population of individuals. Some vaccines have been linked to rare diseases, to autism, and even to occasional death.
Vaccines remain a relatively low-risk health bet, but seasonal flu vaccines have limited upside in comparison to, say, polio or MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella). The lower payoff magnifies the marginal risk.
Yet health care workers aren’t just your average workers. They’re akin to other specialized professions, like soldiering.
Because of the duties soldiers undertake, we’re probably pretty happy that, during training, they wake up in the middle of the night and subject themselves to grueling and sometimes injurious conditions. If they didn’t, we’d be rightfully concerned that they would be ill-equipped to handle the rigors of armed combat.
Health care workers both expose themselves to unique risks, and bear a substantial responsibility for the preservation of life. They spend their days surrounded by disease. And they come into contact with hundreds of fragile individuals who are especially threatened by otherwise quite survivable infections like the flu.
Those unwilling to accept the professional consensus of what constitutes good health practice probably aren’t fit to serve. Imagine someone who objected to wearing gloves and a mask during surgery. Or a nurse who practiced some extreme form of Christian Science and refused to participate in 90 percent of hospital treatments.
Seasonal flu vaccines take on deeper shades of grey. If there’s little consensus about their efficacy or importance in preventing the spread of flu in hospitals, the nurses are probably right to suggest that forcing them to take the vaccine seems like a senseless invasion of their bodily privacy. At least until the effects are tried and tested.
But to treat the civil rights of nurses like the civil rights of everyone else seems short-sighted.
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- “Dalrymple” on health care
- Let’s talk about rights, baby
- Are guns covered in the public option?
- More on healthcare and choice
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Nurses unite!!!!!Hopefully freedom will always win!