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medpundit |
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Thursday, December 19, 2002Doctors who administer teaching hospitals, on the other hand, have a different sort of responsibility to the community. Their job is not to assess intelligence risks or to second-guess state public health officials but to be prepared to care for sick people, and to vaccinate healthy people, in case an outbreak should occur. Clearly, health care workers are also among those most likely to be infected, particularly in the early stages of an epidemic, because they might come into contact with sick people before the disease is identified. Without a core group of immune health workers, it will be hard to respond at all to a mass outbreak of the disease. At the least, hospital administrators owe it to their own personnel to make the vaccine available, and to explain the risks of receiving it or refusing it, before dismissing the validity of the vaccination campaign out of hand. It is the height of arrogance to make the decision for their employees - the embodiment of paternalistic medicine. Nor does their claim that the President’s recommendations are “politically motivated” reflect well on them. It only makes their own position appear politically motivated. Let’s face it, academic medicine isn’t immune to the political leanings of the rest of academia, and in denying a voluntary vaccine to their employees, these academics are making sure that their institutions will give no aid to the war effort. Either that, or they’re just acting as selfish employers who want to avoid employee absence due to side effects of a vaccine. posted by Sydney on 12/19/2002 04:37:00 PM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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