Joe Biden has been asking employers in the United States to give ultimatums to their employees: get vaccinated or lose your job.

The president declared he will soon impose a rule requiring all healthcare personnel to get vaccinated, and he has pushed governments to do the same for schools.

It’s striking to see several of people attending a massive protest against vaccine mandates in Concord, New Hampshire, wearing hospital scrubs.

Leah Cushman, one of the anti-vax, is ready to lose her nursing job rather than getting vaccinated.

“My beliefs are religious. I believe that my creator endowed me with an immune system that protects me, and if I get sick, that’s an act of God. I would not take a medicine that affects the immune system,” said Ms Cushman.

She says that there is no conflict between her views and the duties of her profession.

Ms Cushman emphasises that the Covid vaccines remain “experimental,” despite the fact that the Pfizer vaccine has received full FDA approval in the United States, indicating that the FDA believes sufficient data has been obtained to establish the drug’s safety and effectiveness. However, she claims she no longer takes any vaccines at all.

Managers who have previously opted to enforce vaccine mandates in their hospitals state that the primary motivation is to ensure the safety of their patients.

However, Scott Colby, CEO of Upper Connecticut Valley Hospital, admits that he has lost some medical personnel due to the vaccine mandate, during a period exacerbated busier by the Delta variant and a backlog of non-Covid-related surgeries.

On balance, the hospital manager believes that requiring vaccination is the correct decision, in part because serious coronavirus-related illness among staff – more common among the unvaccinated – is an avoidable waste on resources.

However, Mr Colby asserts that part of the criticism does not appear to be solely medical or religious in nature.

“It’s not just Covid. There are other vaccines that employees are required to have, like MMR or hepatitis. So to say this is not political would be disingenuous,” says Mr Colby.

Back at the event, Leah Cushman, a certified nurse who is also a Republican state lawmaker, says her viewpoint is also about freedom.

“The Biden administration is targeting our sovereign rights. We’re medical professionals, but we still need the ability to choose what happens to our bodies,” she says.

Some of the nurses at the event believed that the hospitals were playing politics, and that if this was truly about patient confidence, the emphasis would be on weekly testing rather than vaccination, given that even people who have received the vaccine can transmit the virus.

Even the idea of routine testing, however, is unacceptable to a sizable portion of the American population who refuse to be vaccinated.

Kahseim Outlaw recently lost his job in Wallingford, Connecticut as a result of this. He was awarded Teacher of the Year at his high school last year, but was unable to comply with the state’s demand to get vaccinated.

“I do not use any kind of synthetic ingredients in my life, whether that be for medicinal purposes, supplementation or food. So the idea of becoming inoculated is something that goes directly against the way that I live my life,” he said.

Mr Outlaw, like all other teachers in the state, was offered weekly testing but declined, claiming it was a “unnecessary medical procedure” that was inconvenient.

“The way that our soul speaks to us, that little voice that tells us when something is in alignment or not, that voice is telling me that I need to make this particular decision right now.”

Mr Outlaw indicated that he was willing to undergo an antibody test to prove that he had contracted Covid in the past, as he believes he did, and that his body’s natural immunity to the virus had been compromised. He acknowledges that there is no way to predict the duration of a normal immunological response.

However, this is not an option that his employer has presented to him.

Of course, Kahseim Outlaw would be in constant contact with kids in the classroom, but what about employees who work fully alone at home? Do their employers have the authority to compel vaccinations?

Rob Segrin lives near Mount Monadnock in a remote region of rural New Hampshire, but has been informed that if he does not receive his first Covid shot by the end of this month, he will lose his IT job.

“My job is a 100% remote, work-from-home type of job for a federal contractor. I never go into an office, I never interact with people. I object to the vaccine because in my opinion there have not been enough years of study into it, but I protect my family in the ways I can,” says Mr Segrin.

“It felt like this ‘do this or you will lose your job’ order was a personal attack against me and my family. Like they are coming after my livelihood,” he continues.

Mr Segrin claims that his conversations with his employer have been unproductive, and as a result, he will lose his full-time employment and, as a result, his health insurance and benefits for his family.

There have been significant differences in public policy across the United States about vaccination, just as there have been inconsistencies at every stage during this pandemic, and Republican states continue to oppose vaccine requirements.

However, as the US grapples with debates over personal liberty and public health, numbers show that the virus continues to cost roughly 1,500 deaths every day in the United States.

Image Credit: Getty

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