[Dayton General Hospital CEO Shane] McGuire liked to refer to his small staff as a family, and many in fact were family, but it had been splitting in two since the beginning of the year, when exactly 50 percent of the hospital’s few hundred employees chose to be vaccinated and 50 percent refused.
McGuire had lined up for the first dose he could get, believing it marked an endpoint to the pandemic; his 25-year-old daughter, Jessica, an employee in the hospital clinic, decided she didn’t feel comfortable getting vaccinated for at least a year.
His medical director told the staff that mass vaccination was “safe, wildly effective and absolutely necessary.” His director of nursing wrote that it was “government overreach and medical tyranny.”
Seventeen employees had been granted religious exemptions. Two had left to take health-care jobs across the border in Idaho. Nine more had either quit or chosen to be fired. But at least 50 employees had gotten vaccinated in the last weeks as a result of the mandate, and McGuire had retained more than 90 percent of his staff.
“There are no words to express how incredible this is, knowing how hard the decision has been for many of you,” he wrote to his staff.
