'Time to move on': Kelowna GP says health care workers fired over COVID-19 vaccine should be rehired
A Kelowna GP has said it would help the BC health system “tremendously” if staff fired for refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccine were allowed back to work.
Dr. Joshua Nordine, who practises at Rutland Medical Associates, said he has not taken the vaccine, branding himself “one of the undesirables.”
About 2,500 health workers were ultimately fired in BC after Dr. Henry issued her COVID-19 vaccine mandate in 2021. An unknown number also retired, quit or had their ability to operate within the medical system restricted.
Controversially, that vaccine mandate – renewed in October 2023 – remains in place in BC, the only part of Canada where that is true. The provincial government has said it has no plans to lift the order, previously telling NowMedia it is necessary to protect “the overall health care system.”
Dr. Nordine was dumped by The Bridge detox clinic in 2021 and said he is still considered, “according to Bonnie Henry, too risky to continue working within the medical system.”
Despite having “roughly” 1,200 patients in Rutland, Dr. Nordine said he can’t work within any Interior Health (IH) facility. Nor does he have permission from IH to follow his patients into long–term care, he said.
But he said he’s still “one of the lucky few” affected by the mandate because he can continue to work, unlike, he said, paramedics, IT specialists and other staff.
“I think the path forward has to be the end of the emergency,” he told KelownaNow.
“Bonnie Henry has kept us in a state of perpetual emergency with the public health orders. And we're the only province currently with a public health order [...] excluding unvaccinated health care workers.”
He pointed to the World Health Organization’s declaration on May 5, 2023 that COVID-19 was “over as a global health emergency.”
“We need to move in that direction,” he said, “then we should just be hiring everybody back.”
He also stressed that, in his view, it lacks “logical common sense” that the mandate only applies to the initial vaccine and not boosters. There’s “no guarantee,” he said, that nurses, doctors or other health care workers are “actually current” with their COVID-19 vaccination.
“If we're not mandating boosters, I think we can have people come back into the province,” he said. “They can work very safely, effectively. We've got a lot of natural immunity.”
He added: “If Bonnie Henry was so adamant that vaccines were so critical then she should be mandating the booster for everybody in health care, and she hasn't.”
John Rustad, the leader of the BC Conservatives, even said he would look into paying the fired workers compensation.
But the BC NDP has vehemently disagreed. The party’s parliamentary secretary for international credentials, Ravi Parmar, said Rustad’s plan was “extremely concerning” and accused him of “Trump-style” politics.
“We led not only the country, but North America in our approach to addressing the pandemic and addressing the challenges with COVID-19,” Parmar said in April.
“And what was really important was letting science prevail, getting politics out of the way and letting scientists like Dr. Henry make the decisions she needs to make.”
The Ministry of Health, meanwhile, has denied there is any link between staff shortages and the vaccine mandate.
But Dr. Nordine begs to differ.
Were the fired workers to be reinstated, he said, it would help the overall system “tremendously.” He added: “It’s a difference of having care and not having care.”
Terri Perepolkin, a lab technologist at Vernon Jubilee Hospital before she was fired in November 2021, has expressed similar sentiments, previously telling NowMedia that she and other unvaccinated workers were “sitting on the sidelines watching the health system crumble and we can’t do anything to help.”
The BC Nurses’ Union has also complained about the “chronically short-staffed” health system in BC.
Last month, the union announced that an arbitrator had ruled that nurses who were fired because they weren’t vaccinated should be given the right to be re-hired – so long as Dr. Henry amends or rescinds her mandate by Jan. 31, 2025.
“Members who return to work will have their seniority and service reinstated and all banks, including sick leave credits, overtime, and special leave entitlements that were not paid out at the time of termination, restored,” the union explained in a public notice.
Dr. Nordine has attempted to go through the courts to challenge the order but a suit he was involved with failed in its primary objectives last month.
A judge ruled that Dr. Henry was justified in maintaining the mandate based on the risk posed by the virus.
Dr. Nordine and the other petitioners had claimed in the suit that the order was unnecessary since COVID-19 no longer presents “an immediate and significant” threat.
The judge did say that the mandates infringed on the workers’ Charter rights, though he added that the infringement was “reasonable in the circumstances.”
He also ruled that the province had failed to properly justify its attitude towards “remote and purely administrative workers.”
Despite that judicial setback, Dr. Nordine remains convinced that “it's time to heal and move on.”
“It's about also treating [the fired workers] with a little bit of dignity and respect,” he said.
“I mean, some of these people have worked for 10, 15, 20 years and they were just, you know, turfed out, terminated; from my understanding, losing their benefits and everything else.”
He added: “Good, safe, effective care can be delivered with unvaccinated health care workers today.”
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