Healthcare workers in South Florida staged a walk-out in an effort to bring attention to how devastating the Covid-19 resurgence has been on facilities and staff in the area.
On Monday, a group of 75 doctors from a hospital in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida protested the state’s low vaccination rates by walking out of their shifts. The hospital has been flooded with unvaccinated patients as the state’s mask mandates and immunization campaigns continue to lag behind the rest of the country’s. Reporter Kerry Sanders was on-site, covering the protest for MSNBC’s Morning Joe program where he shared that an estimated 85 percent of ICU beds in the state are now full before urging viewers to “ignore the nonsense and the absurdities that you’re hearing people say at public meetings and recognize the value of what a vaccine will do.”
According to The New York Times, Florida now leads the U.S. in daily average cases and hospitalizations. According to CNN, five South Florida police officers died from the virus in one week, earlier this month. The healthcare system is struggling to keep up as more beds go to patients with severe Covid complications, leaving staff scrambling to find room for others suffering from more common and unpredictable health crises
Sanders spoke with some of the medical professionals who were involved in the walkout and who pleaded with the public to ignore the misinformation tactics on social media and just get their shot.
“It’s incredibly frustrating because we know vaccines are safe and effective,” Dr. JT Snarksi told Sanders on-air during MSNBC’s Morning Joe program. “And it’s people who go out and talk against them that really go against physicians and medicine and science. It’s not the message we want to get across to people. Vaccines are safe and we need to get our communities vaccinated.”
75 doctors in South Florida walkout in protest as their hospital is flooded with unvaccinated people who got COVID. #MorningJoe pic.twitter.com/gAPOmKGU81
— PoliticusUSA (@politicususa) August 23, 2021
The protest comes after the FDA granted full approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.