Maybe it’s not just the loony, right-wing Tea Partiers (unfair characterization courtesy of MSNBC and the NYT) who have the feeling that creepy, heavy-handed government interference isn’t serving them or their communities. Health-care workers, many of whom are unionized and not generally renowned for their conservative bent, are objecting to mandatory swine-flu vaccinations:
“I don’t want to be a guinea pig,” said Orne Banks-Hopkins, 55, a clerical worker at Washington Hospital Center. “I don’t think I should be forced to take something I don’t want to take.” … “I have a problem with being mandated to put something in my body,” said Sandra Morales, a labor and delivery nurse at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City. … “As a general rule, medicine should be a voluntary occupation,” said George Annas, a Boston University bioethicist. “Once you start requiring doctors to get it, doctors are going to think it’s reasonable to make patients get it. It starts you down that mandatory route, and I don’t think we want to go there.”
Unions themselves, including nurses’ associations and the SEIU, are speaking out against the mandatory vaccines on the grounds of workers’ rights, as nurses and other health-care workers take to New York’s capital in protest. Also in New York, an environmentalist mom who likes her son to bike to school for the earth and his health, is running afoul of the nanny state:
Recommended Stories
Print subscriber? Click here to login/register your account
Digital subscriber? Click here to login/register your account.