Day: August 18, 2021

Houston hospitals have “reached a breaking point” amid a COVID-19 outbreak, which struck weeks after 150 hospital workers were fired by Houston Methodist hospital, one of several hospitals struggling.

by Jon Miltimore

Image Credit: KHOU-11 (screen shot)

Jennifer Bridges knew what was coming when her director at Houston Methodist hospital called her up in June to inquire about her vaccination status.

Bridges, a 39-year-old registered nurse, responded “absolutely not” when asked if she was vaccinated or had made an effort to get vaccinated. She was terminated on the spot.

“We all knew we were getting fired,” Bridges, 39, told CBS News. “We knew unless we took that shot to come back, we were getting fired today. There was no ifs, ands or buts.”

Bridges was one of more than 150 hospital workers fired by Houston Methodist hospital.

“All last year, through the COVID pandemic, we came to work and did our jobs,” said Kara Shepherd, a labor and delivery nurse who joined Bridges and other workers in an unsuccessful lawsuit. “We did what we were asked. This year, we’re basically told we’re disposable.”

‘Please Send Help Now’

Shepherd and her colleagues may be disposable in the eyes of hospital administrators, but they are perhaps not as easily replaced as she or Houston Methodist thought.

Two months after firing unvaccinated hospital staff, Houston Methodist is one of several area hospitals experiencing a severe shortage of medical personnel. Media reports say hospitals have “reached a breaking point” because of a flood of COVID-19 cases.

In an editorial published Tuesday, the Houston Chronicle said the 25-county hospital area that includes Houston had more patients in hospital beds — more than 2,700 — than at any point in 2021. News reports make it clear that hospitals are struggling to keep up.

KHOU-11, a local news station, says medical tents have been erected outside of Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital but are vacant because of a shortage of nurses.

“Please send help now,” said Dr. George Williams (depicted in main photo), chief ICU medical officer for LBJ Hospital.

While most media reports focus on LBJ Hospital, reports also make it clear other hospitals, including Houston Methodist, are experiencing similar struggles. The Houston Chronicle says Harris Health System (which includes LBJ) is short some 250 nurses, while the University of Texas Medical Branch has requested an additional 100 nurses to help address staff shortages at four hospitals.

Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center, a private Houston hospital jointly owned by Baylor College and a local healthcare system, said the hospital “is definitely being impacted” by the nurse shortage.

As for Houston Methodist, the hospital is reportedly struggling as well — although they’ve yet to admit it publicly.

“An internal memo at Houston Methodist Hospital said it ‘is struggling with staffing as the numbers of our COVID-19 patients rise,’” the Chronicle reports.

Public officials are scrambling to address the shortage, which has created a massive patient backlog throughout the Houston area. More than a week ago, Tex Gov. Greg Abbott requested out of stateassistance for the statewide crisis, including 2,500 out of state nurses. LBJ Hospital officials said those nurses have not yet arrived.

The metro-wide shortage of nurses reportedly came to light when an ER doctor emailed a state senator about the dire situation in hospitals.

“The combined increase in volume from (COVID and) existing normal volume (and) nursing shortage has made this a terrible disaster at every ER and hospital in the city of Houston,” the physician wrote, according to the Chronicle.

Cobra Effects

It’s unclear to what extent Houston Methodist’s decision to fire 150 unvaccinated medical workers exacerbated the nursing crisis. For perhaps obvious reasons, hospital officials have been mum on the issue.

What we know is that Houston hospitals that did not abruptly fire 150 employees struggled to deal with the COVID spike, and in some cases people died as a result. So it’s safe to presume that Houston Methodist’s decision to fire 150 employees a few weeks before the Delta variant arrived in force didn’t make the situation any better and probably made it much worse.

Some may be tempted to think Houston Methodist was able to quickly replace the workers they lost, but evidence suggests this is unlikely. Apart from the broader shortage, front line nurses “are burned out,” they say.

“We are all tired of this; nurses are tired of this,” Texas Nurses Association CEO Cindy Zolnierek wrote in a recent public letter.

That Houston Methodist hospital didn’t intend to exacerbate its shortage of hospital staff goes without saying, but it’s also an important reminder about what economists call the Cobra Effect.

Every human decision brings about consequences, intended ones and unintended ones. Unintended consequences are so common economists often call them “Cobra Problems,” after an interesting historical event in India that occurred when the British Empire tried to eradicate cobras by putting out a bounty on them. (Can you guess what happened?)https://www.youtube.com/embed/6mGSN2YqeYE?autoplay=1&feature=oembed

When hospital administrators set their policy — get vaccinated or lose your job — their goal was to increase vaccination rates of hospital staff. The unintended consequence was a shortage of nurses and other hospital workers during a deadly pandemic.

In June, Houston Methodist’s president, Marc Boom, sounded confident that his coercive methods were effective, noting that almost 25,000 of the health system’s 26,000 workers were fully vaccinated.

Other Houston hospitals saw things differently. Two months before Houston Methodist fired its workers, Harris Health System officials announced they would not be requiring hospital workers to get vaccinated, noting none of the vaccines were fully approved by the FDA.

Americans will of course disagree about which CEO’s approach was the correct one. The pandemic, after all, has been bitterly divisive because we’re deeply divided over this very question: should coercive means be employed to achieve certain desired healthcare outcomes, and if so, to what extent?

In 2020, political leaders around the world said yes to this question, and the results were disastrous. A year later, private companies are playing a different version of the same game: take the vaccine, or get fired.

Like the lockdown champions of 2020, corporate leaders no doubt believe their action is moral, proper, and will achieve their desired result. But as the Cobra Effect reminds us, focusing strictly on desired outcomes and ignoring potential unintended outcomes is a good way to get bit.

https://humansarefree.com/2021/08/150-unvaccinated-nurses-fired-shortage-houston.html

If potential plans by “president” Joe Biden to restrict all interstate travel to “vaccinated” only come to fruition, grocery store shelves all across the country could turn bare.

All News Pipeline says it received photos from someone in New Jersey depicting mostly empty aisles at a local Shoprite store, this the consequence of shipping problems that are already occurring due to existing Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) lockdowns.

In the event that Biden adds to this with an interstate travel ban on the “unvaccinated,” truckers who refuse Donald “father of the vaccine” Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” injections would end up being prohibited from delivering goods, making an already precarious situation even worse.

While the Biden regime says it has shelved the idea for now as it would be too polarizing, the sentiment from his people seems to be that it could be an option later, and that nothing is ultimately off the table when it comes to coercing unvaccinated Americans into getting jabbed.

As you might expect, many truckers, if not most of them, are staunch conservatives who have no intention of ever getting injected for the Fauci Flu. Should China Joe try to force them to, we expect that many would simply quit, leaving the supply chain exposed to major vulnerabilities worse than the ones that already exist.

“… can you imagine an America where food is no longer brought across state lines because of Nazi-style ‘papers please demands’ being made on interstate highways at US state borders?” asks Stefan Stanford, writing for All News Pipeline.

Think Biden-Imposed Mass Starvation Could Never Happen? Think Again!

Stanford warns that any such “laws” would almost certainly starve out the largest cities first, followed by the mid-range and smaller cities and eventually the rural areas.

Americans would be “fighting against each other for what little morsels of food are remaining,” he says. This would appear to be the goal of Beijing Biden who, carrying on the legacy of Barack Hussein Obama, seems to want Americans to starve.

Starvation has been used time and time again throughout history as a tactic of oppression by rogue governments against the people they are trying to rule.

In this case, the goal is to make unvaccinated Americans so hungry that they are willing to roll up their sleeves to have their DNA permanently modified with experimental gene therapy.

What would actually happen, though, is that all Americans regardless of their vaccination status would end up suffering. With no food on the store shelves anywhere, it would be a true “Hunger Games” scenario where only the strongest survive.

It might sound a little far-fetched, especially to younger Americans who have never lived through this type of thing, but it is not out of the question. We are in uncharted territory as a society, if you can even call it that anymore.

“… at the end of World War II, Eastern Europe had front row tickets to a famine of biblical proportions,” Stanford writes. “Starting in 1941, up to 1,000 citizens starved to death every day for three years.”

“Bodies were discovered in the street and reports of cannibalism became a problem less than 12 months into the ordeal. Survivors ate anything they could get their hands on, such as birds, rats, and family pets. However, all those animals soon became hard to find.”

From there, the situation spiraled out of control as roving gangs quickly formed that attacked people in order to eat them. This is what happens when people get so hungry and desperate that they are willing to do anything for a meal.

By Ethan Huff, Guest writer

https://humansarefree.com/2021/08/biden-criminalize-crossing-state-lines-while-unvaccinated.html

When I teach women how they ought to win their disobedient husbands, there are always cries of “What if…?” It’s as if they think their ways are higher than God’s ways. It’s as if God must have left out some vital information that they must teach women. It’s as if God certainly must not know what he’s taking about. “Oh, I tried that but it didn’t work.” Did they really? Is there a time limit on obedience to God?

As I read 1 Peter 3:1-6 the other morning in my quiet time with the Lord, I was once again amazed at the beauty of God’s ways and how absolutely counter cultural they are.

If you are married to an unsaved or disobedient husband, I encourage you to carefully and thoughtfully read 1 Peter 2 and 3 until you grasp what God is saying here. These are God’s perfect instructions to you and how you deal with your husband.

First of all, you are to live in subjection to him (1 Peter 3:1). “But wait, he’s living in sin. He’s not a believer. How can I live in subjection to him?” Because God’s ways are perfect, and this is what He commands that you do in order to win him. No, you don’t submit to sin, but most husbands aren’t asking their wives to sin. Fix what he wants for dinner. Dress the way he wants you to dress. Let him decide what restaurant you eat at, where you go for vacation, and how he wants to raise the children. (The behavior your children see you living out will have a far more powerful influence on them for good or bad then the specifics of how you raise them.) This is living in subjection to your husband. He’s the God ordained leader in your home, even if he isn’t a believer or is living in disobedience to God.

“…they also may without the word be won by the conversation of the wives; While they behold your chaste conversation coupled with fear” (1 Peter 3:1,2). Conversation in these verses refers to behavior. Is your husband seeing a wife who is controlled by Jesus Christ? Are you loving, kind, joyful, and a servant? Women, this is so much more powerful than any words you can say to him!

“But can’t I point out his sin? Am I to say nothing at all?” How many wives don’t point out their husbands’ sins? How many wives say nothing at all? I venture to say very, very few. This is why there are Proverbs about quarreling and contentious wives. Most wives say way too much! They lecture their husbands, nag, and manipulate them. They think this is somehow going to win their husbands to themselves and to the Lord. It’s NOT! It will have the exact opposite effect. God wants you winning your husband with the way that you live. Your actions are a lot more powerful than your words. Let the Holy Spirit convict him, not you!

Then God goes on to tell us about this powerful behavior that godly woman are to exhibit to their husbands. “But let it be the hidden man of the heart in that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price” (1 Peter 3:4). God wants us to be defined by femininity: gentle, kind, nurturing, serving, loving, not argumentative, not quarreling, peaceful, and good. These are what godly women need to be focused on adorning themselves with, not with the things the world convinces women to adorn themselves with. Those things fade. Godly behavior does not.

“For after this manner in the old time the holy women also, who trusted in God, adorned themselves, being in subjection unto their own husbands” (1 Peter 3:5). What did the holy women of old adorn themselves with? A meek and quiet spirit and submission to their husbands. This is what God tells us makes a woman beautiful in His sight. Are you trying to be beautiful in the world’s eyes or in God’s?

“Even as Sara obeyed Abraham, calling him lord: whose daughters ye are, as long as ye do well, and are not afraid with any amazement” (1 Peter 3:6). Yes, we are to obey our husbands. Do you want to know an easy way to recognize a false teacher? One that negates this teaching and tries to convince you that it’s cultural or gives some other reason that they have made up. Flee these teachers!

Obey God. His ways are good. Win that disobedient husband of yours. Show him Christ on a daily basis. Let him see Christ living in and through you. He may not repent and believe in Jesus Christ until he’s on his deathbed, but that’s okay. He’ll spend eternity with Jesus Christ rather than burning in hell for eternity. Keep eternity always in your vision, dear women.

Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as it is fit in the Lord.
Colossian 3:18

God’s Counter Cultural Ways of Winning Your Husband