Vaccine mandates made America more vulnerable

 Fox News:

COVID-19 vaccine mandates have put some vital U.S health and safety institutions in a tough spot after cutting personnel who didn’t comply.

Overlapping federal mandates for military personnel, state mandates for health care workers, and other private mandates have created an increasingly difficult situation in the face of the omicron variant as numbers continue to surge in some states due to the much greater transmissibility of the variant.

President Biden in August issued a federal vaccine mandate that required military personnel in each branch to receive a vaccination, and later issued one for any business with over 100 employees. The military has insisted that the number of separations do not present a problem, but other sectors, such as public health and safety, have struggled to handle the loss of personnel.

Each military branch had a different deadline, but by Dec. 15 each deadline had passed and the services began to separate personnel who refused to comply or did not earn an exemption on religious or medical grounds.

The Marines tracked for the most number of holdouts, with around 10,000 active-duty Marine Corps personnel refusing the vaccine and about 94% meeting the vaccine requirement. Some Marines who did not comply viewed the separations as part of a "political purge" by the Biden administration over beliefs they say the First Amendment protected.

"The one message I got from the colonel above me was: ‘Tread very carefully, this is political, you will be crushed like an ant.’ And he told me that because he cares about me," an anonymous lieutenant colonel told Fox News Digital. "Do I want to continue serving in an institution that crushes people for bringing up reasonable points in defending their faith?"
...

But as thousands of health care workers faced termination over their refusal to comply, Biden deployed over 1,000 military doctors, nurses, and medics to cover the shortage in the face of the omicron variant, which may further strain military health care services.

"FEMA is deploying hundreds of ambulances and EMS crews to transport patients," Biden said Monday during a call with the National Governors Association. "We’ve already deployed emergency response teams in Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, Vermont, New Hampshire, and New Mexico. We’re ready to provide more hospital beds as well."
...

"We have a massive nursing shortage," Eric Smith, the statewide field director for the New York State Nurses Association, told the New York Daily News last month. "We have a vacuum in the double and triple digits all across the New York area."
...

Five governors called on the Pentagon to rescind the vaccine mandate for National Guard members, while Texas Gov. Greg Abbott outright refused to enforce it.

"As Governor of Texas, I am the commander-in-chief of this State’s militia," Abbott wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. "In that capacity, on October 4, 2021, I ordered the Adjutant General of Texas to comply with my Executive Order GA-39."

"If unvaccinated guardsmen suffer any adverse consequences within the State of Texas, they will have only President Biden and his Administration to blame," he explained.
...

The mandates were a mistake.  The consequences of them at this point or worse than the virus.  The vaccines have been somewhat effective for especially the most vulnerable.  For healthy people, they have been a mixed bag. 

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