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The standards for treatment of raw meat for school kids is a lot lower than the standards for fast food places, although fast food chains have really high standards to avoid meat contamination. Remember the Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak in the mid-nineties? Yeah, so do they—now they've got some of the best standards in the nation for handling raw meat. As high as the standards are at fast food places, the standards for processed meat headed to schools are so low that no reputable restaurant would buy it. You know, USA Today is awful, and yet they go and do some great investigative journalism every so often. Go figure.
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Some Children's Hospital of Philadelphia employees claimed that, for religious reasons, they didn't have to get vaccines. The hospital fired them. Duh. They're like pharmacists who claim that they don't have to provide people with some medications because their religion prohibits it. You're in the wrong line of business, guys.
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The new San Francisco bridge is made in China. We're Rome. It's 400 CE.
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Not quite. If a certain pharmacist who doesn’t want to dispense certain medications was the only source available, then that might be a problem. But that’s obviously not the case. Why should I care if Joe Pharmacist wants to run his business the way he wants, and he has moral issues with certain drugs? I can go buy those meds from Jane Pharmacist down the street. And even if I live somewhere with only one pharmacist, why should Joe be forced to sell something he doesn’t want to sell? Obtaining a source for my meds is my problem, not Joe’s.
The hospital worker situation is more like a Catholic who is denied a job as a youth minister in a Southern Baptist church… or a blind person denied employment as an NBA referee. Some jobs have certain minimum requirements, and if people are unwilling or unable to meet those requirements, then they’re automatically disqualified.
I agree with the hospital’s right to fire workers for this cause, but I find the reasoning a little silly. If vaccinations are so good at protecting people from infection (which I think they are, btw — I heartily believe in them), then why should a vaccinated person ever fear exposure to someone who isn’t vaccinated? This issue comes up in schools, which sometimes refuse to allow unvaccinated children to attend the school. The school’s reasoning is that it puts other children in danger. How can that be, if vaccinations do their job?
And for a reminder about the standards at fast food places, I refer the reader to the still-relevant Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser.
Your pharmacist reasoning is wrong I.Publius. It would be one thing if the pharmacist simply didn’t stock the drug in question. The problem is that pharmacists dispense the drug based on morale judgment of the patient’s situation. Patient A may get the drug while Patient B is denied. Might as well deny people based on race and religion too. The pharmacist doesn’t have a problem with the drug. The pharmacist has a problem with you.
To address your vaccination question: Medical responders need to be vaccinated because if there is an emergency situation, risk needs to be mitigated to make sure medical responders can function incapacitated without worry of catching said disease.
And with children, it’s not that it puts the masses at risk, it’s that it puts the unvaccinated at risk. There is always a chance that a vaccination doesn’t take or that a child is immunosuppressed. Again, mitigating risk. And in some cases, even vaccinated people can still be carriers of disease and pass it to those that are not vaccinated (usually kids who aren’t old enough for certain vaccines yet.)
And viruses are always mutating (hence the need for flu shots every year). People can get chicken pox more than once. And chicken pox shows up in adults/elderly as shingles. Some vaccines are better than others.
You’re confusing the pharmacist with the pharmacy. If a pharmacist refuses to dispense Rogaine because it offends him, he should not be surprised if the pharmacy (his employer) fires him. He can tell his employer that customers are free to go elsewhere, and his employer will likely point out that’s precisely the problem. The same applies to hospital employees who refuse to get immunizations—they can tell their employers, and suggest that those who don’t like that can go elsewhere, but the logical path is to fire them. Medical professionals who are unfit to do their jobs shouldn’t be surprised when they find themselves fired.
I suspect that the problem is, instead, that there are kids hospitalized with immunodeficiencies, such as kids with chemotherapy, or kids for whom that’s their primary ailment.
Thanks for mentioning “Fast Food Nation,” MB—that’s the book where I learned about all of this, but I totally forgot.
I.Publius writes, “why should a vaccinated person ever fear exposure to someone who isn’t vaccinated?”
Because no vaccine offers complete protection all by itself. Vaccines offer partial protection, and herd immunity does the rest of the work. To be safe from diseases, people need both: they need the vaccine, and they need the rest of the herd to be vaccinated too. If enough people refuse vaccines (and try to benefit from the risk others took in being vaccinated, a risk that is immensely low BTW), then herd immunity drops.
Cecil, thanks for the information. I didn’t know that about vaccines.
grs — I can’t imagine how a pharmacist could know much (or anything) about someone’s situation. I’ve never heard of a pharmacist dispensing some meds to particular customers, but not to others. The complaint that I’ve heard is when pharmacists (or pharmacies) refuse to dispense medicines they are morally opposed to, such as a morning after birth control pill. What sort of medicines are you referring to that are dispensed to some customers but not to others?
Mehtergine and Tetracycline are prescribed after abortions. Mehtergine is also commonly used post childbirth. Tetracycline is a common anti-biotic used for a variety of treatments. But after an abortion, the two are prescribed together in very specific dosages, in specific quantities, to be taken for a specific duration.
I have seen pharmacists do this with my own eyes. I have worked with these people. I have seen them give to some while refusing others. It’s bullshit. They refused to give people medicine based on the procedure they had done.