Portrait of Washington hospital illustrates rural health-care workers' deeply held resistance to coronavirus vaccination

Dayton, in Columbia County,
Washington (Wikipedia map)

President Biden's coronavirus vaccine mandate for health-care workers has not, by and large, resulted in widespread staff shortages from workers quitting instead of getting vaccinated. But vaccine mandates are far less popular in rural America, as illustrated by an in-depth look at a hospital in rural Washington state, Eli Saslow reports for The Washington Post.

Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat, issued one of the nation's first vaccine mandates for health-care workers in August. With days to go before the deadline, the issue was far from settled at Dayton General Hospital, according to CEO Shane McGuire. "Dozens of McGuire’s employees were still marked as unvaccinated. At least 15 were in the process of applying for religious or medical exemptions, a few had already quit in protest, and many more were facing termination unless they decided to vaccinate against the coronavirus in the next five days before the mandate went into effect," Saslow reports. "McGuire liked to refer to his small staff as a family, and many in fact were family, but it had been splitting in two since the beginning of the year, when exactly 50 percent of the hospital’s few hundred employees chose to be vaccinated and 50 percent refused."

The story recounts McGuire's struggle to educate staffers about vaccines and make it more palatable to skeptical staff while making staff feel that their concerns were heard. Saslow also profiles Katie Roughton, the hospital's director of nursing, who quit rather than get vaccinated. "Regardless of scientific facts or the vaccine data, she believed what she was hearing on her TV, her computer, the local grocery store, her own family dinner table: The vaccines were rushed and oversold, and worse yet, the state mandate signaled the government’s latest attempt to seize greater control," Saslow reports. "It was an infringement on individual rights. It was socialism. Her father-in-law had taken an experimental anthrax vaccine before deploying for the Gulf War, and he blamed the side effects for making him permanently disabled. Four of her family members were being forced to quit their jobs over vaccine mandates, and they were encouraging her to do the same."

Roughton snapped when one of the hospital's doctors called her to ask how she believed they could further control the spread of the virus, Saslow reports: "'Do you want my personal or professional opinion?' she asked, and before long she was prodding him about the breakthrough infection and the science of vaccines, and he was calling her 'stupid,' and they were screaming at each other — doctor against nurse, liberal against conservative, no longer partners in patient care but adversaries staking out opposite sides in an ideological battle that Roughton had been fighting since."