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The Truth Behind Flu Shot Mandates for Healthcare Workers
by Claire Dwoskin, Founder, Childrens Medical Safety Research Institute
When you are sick, injured or just need a check-up, you trust that your doctor is giving you valid, conflict-free, evidence-based advice on what is best for your health. The last thing you want to believe is that your doctor is putting a drug company’s interests, or their own, over your health.
What if you discovered that the flu vaccine, or any vaccine, is being given to you or your child without your consent or knowledge, or to a loved one in the hospital at a time when it is contraindicated for his or her condition? What if you learned that your health care providers were, themselves, force-vaccinated against their better judgement just to stay employed? What if these policies were ultimately driven by financial incentives for those who make and enforce them?
The following answers, interspersed with personal stories I have heard directly from parents, patients and healthcare workers, will have you questioning the next time you are faced with vaccine decisions. Protecting your loved ones and your right to informed consent when it comes to any medical procedure that carries with it the risk of injury or death depends on YOU doing your own research. An informed and educated healthcare consumer is the best protection against becoming a statistic in the epidemic of eroding national health.
Uncovering the Facts Behind Mandatory Flu Vaccines for Healthcare Workers
Dr. Meryl Nass, M.D., a 36-year career board certified internal medicine practitioner in Maine, has written extensively about vaccine safety and vaccine policy. She is most well-known for her work with hundreds of Gulf War Veterans who became ill after receiving the anthrax vaccine. Her most recent research has uncovered new information about a nationally imposed flu vaccine policy for healthcare workers. This policy also affects patients at hospitals and in pediatric practices, and general practitioners who are being lobbied, cajoled and sometimes deceived into getting flu vaccines.
Dr. Nass discovered that the Quality Improvement Organizations (QIOs) established by Medicare and organizations like the National Quality Forum, a federally established, public-private health quality assessment organization are created for the purpose of enforcing policies that are selected as “quality improvement” measures, whether or not they improve care or lower costs. They are surrogate measures that can then be used to get institutions to either comply or lose millions of dollars in reimbursements (up to 4% of acute care hospitals’ total Medicare reimbursements). The more employees and patients vaccinated, the higher the reimbursement rate.

In a recent article, Dr. Nass described the complaint and resulting settlement of seven health care workers in Erie, PA who were fired for refusing flu vaccines for religious reasons. They won an EEOC settlement of $300,000 which requires them to be reinstated and receive back pay and compensatory damages for alleged religious discrimination.
The following is an excerpt from a local newspaper that covered the story:
The commission had claimed Saint Vincent violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when it fired the six workers, who refused to be vaccinated after the hospital implemented a mandatory flu vaccination policy for all employees. The hospital granted medical exemptions to 14 other workers.
The bottom line is that the federal government squeezed hospitals by requiring hospitals to report the rates of yearly influenza vaccinations of both hospital staff and hospital patients, including these two measures in a global calculation of hospital ‘quality.’ A hospital’s ‘quality’ number determines approximately 3.75% of its overall Medicare reimbursements rate in 2017 (with yearly adjustments to this number). In the healthcare industry, 3.75% is enough to make a hospital sink or swim. The hospitals, predictably, acquiesced by demanding their employees be vaccinated or fired.
This is evidently not so much a health policy, but a transactional policy: mandates are being forced upon employees so that hospitals will reap financial gain. Simply put, your practitioners’ health and autonomy are being used as a bartering tool to increase Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements, which can determine whether a hospital has a profit and loss when margins are slim.
Personal Story #1: Hospital Owner Understands Danger of Flu Vaccine But Keeps Policy Anyway for Funding

Defiant nurses who refuse the flu vaccine and choose instead to be shamed by being forced to wear a mask in order to keep their job.
While at dinner one evening with a friend who owns five small hospitals, we discussed flu vaccines. He mentioned that he had required all of his employees to be vaccinated and he, likewise, took the flu vaccine. Following the mandate, he noticed he was having the highest employee absentee rate ever since owning the hospitals. He presumed that his employees had gotten sick after getting vaccinated.
Why? The hospital owner described becoming terribly ill right after getting his flu vaccine. In retrospect, he wondered why he needed it since he had never gotten the flu before getting the vaccine. He decided the following year that, despite continuing to require that his employees be vaccinated, he would no longer take the risk himself.
Guess what? He continued to notice high absentee rates but he remained healthy that winter. His name and hospital system will remain anonymous, but his experience was not isolated. I have heard from other high level hospital personnel that they also opt out of the flu vaccine.
Who is/are Behind the Flu Vaccine Mandates?

The CDC, already suffering credibility woes on a variety of issues, has another to add to the pile. On their website, they deny they are directly issuing the flu vaccine mandates:
CDC does not issue any requirements or mandates for state agencies, health systems, or health care workers regarding infection control practices, including influenza vaccination. There are no legally mandated vaccinations for adults, except for persons entering military service. CDC does recommend certain immunizations for adults, depending on age, occupation, and other circumstances, but these immunizations are not required by law.
However, the mandates originate from the CDC’s National Health Care Safety Network, a healthcare-associated infection (HAI) tracking system used to generate benchmarks for healthcare institutions. It deems high rates of influenza vaccines among healthcare personnel a surrogate “quality measure” for infection control.
…facilities must report employee coverage rates of flu vaccination as a quality measure: “Currently, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) requires reporting of influenza vaccination coverage for workers in acute care hospitals as a part of the Inpatient Quality Reporting Program through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Health Care Safety Network, a web-based data reporting system using National Quality Forum (NQF) #0431. Each hospital’s influenza vaccination coverage among their health care personnel will be included as a quality measure on Medicare’s consumer-based Hospital Compare program.”
According to Dr. Nass, this scheme, which ultimately requires hospitals and physicians to choose between patient health and profits, can be traced to one person.
It turns out that the same person, Faruque Ahmed, Ph.D. of CDC’s Immunization Services Division, is both the responsible person for getting NQF #0431 (healthcare worker [HCW] yearly flu shots) accepted as a quality measure, and the first author of CDC’s meta-analysis of healthcare worker/healthcare personnel flu shots and whether they benefited patients. Studies over 64 years fail to show that staff vaccinations reduce flu infections and deaths in patients–but good luck figuring that out from the gobbledygook they published.
Dr. Nass further explains that the quality measure was based on statistical modeling techniques that are themselves based on assumptions, estimates, beliefs, and attributions, and that the little evidence they did have was of very low quality. Essentially, she says, it is as if the person grading the test is the test taker himself, and on top of that, he wrote the test and the material he was tested on.
Personal Story #2: Nursing Student Forced to Change Careers Over Flu Shot
A nursing student who was completing her degree was forced to get a flu shot in order to participate in clinical practice experience which was required for graduation. She reported:
I was forced to get a flu shot, which I later found out contained mercury, and I felt sick from it for over a year. I had unexplained fevers on and off, approximately every two weeks. I did a detox treatment aimed at removing the mercury which seemed to resolve my symptoms. I knew I wanted to become pregnant soon and did not want to put my health or that of my unborn child at risk, so I switched careers to avoid having to get the flu shot again.
That bears repeating: she was forced to switch careers, which required abandoning her dreams and her hard-earned education, in order to exercise her trained professional judgement over her own health. A nursing degree typically costs between $40,000 and $100,000; a doctor might incur more than $800,000 in educational expenses, making the cost of refusing to compromise his or her own health an even greater, if not impossible, sacrifice.
So financially, most medical professionals are over a barrel when it comes to refusing a policy that could cost them their job if they refuse. Since the flu shot mandate was not in place when most initially decided upon their career path, today’s experienced healthcare workers must choose between complying or the considerable financial and emotional consequences of fighting for their health freedom.
Read the Full Article at VaccineImpact.com