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Heather du Plessis-Allan: Why are nurses still being stood down over the Covid vaccine?

Author
Heather du Plessis-Allan,
Publish Date
Tue, 21 Jun 2022, 6:42PM
(Photo / Getty)
(Photo / Getty)

Heather du Plessis-Allan: Why are nurses still being stood down over the Covid vaccine?

Author
Heather du Plessis-Allan,
Publish Date
Tue, 21 Jun 2022, 6:42PM

Why are we still firing nurses over the Covid jab?

We have a shortage of 4000 nurses.

We have a report that a woman died in Middlemore emergency department of a brain bleed last Wednesday morning because there was an 8 hour wait to see a doctor.

We have surgeries being delayed another month in Wellington hospital because there aren’t enough nurses to cope.

Palmerston North Hospital is so short staffed it’s being described as unsafe.

Christchurch Hospital’s general team has never cared for so many people at once before.                    

We are paying south Auckland GPs $1400 an hour to take pressure of Middlemore.

And we’re still standing these nurses down form their work.

And by the way, we’re not talking about anti-vaxxers. We’re talking about nurses who’ve had two jabs but simply don’t want to get a third. So what? About a million Kiwis did exactly the same thing: got two jabs, skipped the third.

As I say, we have a shortage of 4000 nurses and we’ve stood down another 518 for the booster.

If you go into hospital tonight with a brain bleed, do you want a nurse?  Or do you only want a nurse who’s been boosted?

If you say you only want a boosted nurse, are you then prepared to take a chance with your life and wait 8 hours so you can see a boosted nurse?

What I’m really surprised to hear is that the nurses’ union - the NZNO supports this.

Their members do not want to work alongside nurses who haven’t had the booster.

And yet look at how many medical staff haven’t had the flu jab: 46 percent.

This is so crazy that I can’t quite get my head around it: that we would rather delay operations and leave people living in pain without a hip replacement and we would rather make it even harder for our hospitals to cope right now than let nurses stay at work just because they wouldn’t get a third jab. Crazy.

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