North Carolina hospital network fires around 175 staffers for not getting vaccinated

A large North Carolina hospital network said Tuesday that it has fired nearly 200 workers for failing to get vaccinated against Covid-19.

Dr. David H. Priest, chief for safety for Novant Health, said at a briefing that about 175 staffers did not comply with the system’s vaccination deadline.

“By doing that, by not getting vaccinated, they voluntarily resign,” Priest said.

The departures will not affect staffing at the hospital system of over 35,000 employees, Priest said, because the hospital has been using temporary staff members throughout the pandemic to make up for shortages because of staff members who have fallen ill with Covid.

Novant Health, a not-for-profit health care system with headquarters in Winston-Salem, operates over 15 medical centers and numerous other facilities in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia.

Priest said one “datapoint that remains stagnant” is how Covid is disproportionally hospitalizing the unvaccinated at Novant Health’s facilities.

“As of this morning, 97 percent of our patients with Covid-19 in our ICUs, 98 percent of Covid patients on ventilators right now are unvaccinated,” Priest said. “This continues to be a pandemic of the unvaccinated — there are occasionally breakthrough cases, but you can still see that vaccines are holding up.”