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Legacy Health workers refusing COVID-19 vaccine prepare to be fired


Arnhild Espino, a registered nurse at Mt. Hood Medical Center, and Coleman Nagy, a respiratory therapist at Legacy Emanuel, were both denied religious exemptions for the COVID-19 vaccine by Legacy Health. They face being fired in October. (KATU)
Arnhild Espino, a registered nurse at Mt. Hood Medical Center, and Coleman Nagy, a respiratory therapist at Legacy Emanuel, were both denied religious exemptions for the COVID-19 vaccine by Legacy Health. They face being fired in October. (KATU)
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Less than three weeks remain for health care workers in Oregon to get fully vaccinated against COVID-19 or risk being fired.

The state is mandating that all health care workers be fully vaccinated by Oct. 18.

Several workers within the Legacy Health system say hundreds of employees were alerted Monday that their COVID-19 vaccination exemption requests were denied.

"I am upholding the beliefs of my faith according to being a Bible-believing Christian, and what I hold dear to me as a Christian,” Arnhild Espino, a registered nurse at Mt. Hood Medical Center, said.

Espino is one of the employees whose religious exemption was rejected. She’s been a registered nurse for decades and is now facing a possible firing.

Coleman Nagy’s religious exemption was also denied. He works as a respiratory therapist at Legacy Emanuel. He’s worked in health care for decades.

According to Nagy’s denial email, Legacy Health is determining whether to approve COVID-19 vaccine exemptions based on two measures, consistency and specificity.

The email says the exception workgroup “believes there is no ideal way to determine a sincerely held religious belief” and therefore used consistency (whether or not the person had recently received vaccines) and specificity (if the religious belief listed is clearly against the COVID-19 vaccine) to determine exemptions.

Nagy’s letter reads, “Your request was carefully reviewed and your request for religious exemption was denied because the information you provided does not meet one or more of the criteria.”

The Oregon Nurses Association (ONA) is also calling out Legacy Health, saying the “blanket rejections” are “bad policy” that further impact that staffing shortages at hospitals and will “ultimately impact quality of patient care.”

"Across the state, Oregon’s registered nurses have a high rate of vaccination (over 80%). However, it is also true that a small number of nurses have legitimate reasons for filing exemption requests," ONA's statement reads. "ONA believes that hospital systems must take these exemption requests seriously, as required by state and federal law."

In a statement sent to KATU, Legacy Health defended its decision process saying, “Legacy has completed a thorough review of all employee requests for medical or religious exceptions and has shared decisions with nearly all employees who requested an exception. Legacy’s number one priority is patient and employee safety. In anticipation of the potential impact to our staffing, Legacy has developed a series of contingency plans across all of our facilities to minimize the effect on patient care.”

Espino has decided to fight back. She says somewhere between 400 and 800 employees got the same rejection email Monday. She doesn’t believe the health group truly looked through each exemption request as it said.

"They're telling us they're taking this great care, individually reviewing each one of our requests, but yet we all receive the same form letter stating that our exemption has been declined,” Espino said.

Since she can’t appeal the exemption work group’s rejection, she’s instead appealing the exemption process.

“I believe that my body is a temple of the Holy Ghost and I am, therefore, a product of that,” Espino explained. “By putting something into my body that wasn’t meant to be is defiling my body.”

Espino says being forced to get the vaccine is similar to one of the most egregious crimes.

“It’s almost like, and I don’t want to be crude to say this, but like you’re being expected to be raped, you know, take something into your body you don’t want. That’s not welcome,” she said.

Espino is a non-denominational Christian. She says she doesn’t drink or smoke and she tries to eat healthily. She says it’s been years since she’s gotten a vaccine.

“I was not aware, and even as a nurse who went to college who studied microbiology and immunology, I was not aware that they used fetal cell lines in vaccines and some other vaccines,” Espino said. “This was all when I started researching the COVID vaccine. It was amazing to me that what I didn’t know.”

Nagy also has problems with the use of fetal cells in vaccine development as he strongly opposes abortion. He says he doesn’t belong to anyone religion but is spiritual.

When asked how that would qualify him for a religious exemption, he said, "The law states that you don’t have to belong to an organized denomination."

Nagy says he has previously been vaccinated for other illnesses, but after learning about the use of fetal cells, "I can’t turn back."

According to the Oregon Health Authority (OHA), "Fetal cell lines are grown in laboratories from cells originally taken from fetal tissue. They can be grown indefinitely."

OHA says COVID-19 vaccine developers used two historic cell lines taken from fetuses in the 1970s and 1980s.

"Producing vaccines that rely on these cell lines does not require new abortions, because the cells reproduce themselves indefinitely in the laboratory," OHA further explained.

Several religious leaders, including those from faiths with strong opposition to abortions, are strongly encouraging their members to get vaccinated.

In an August statement, Pope Francis said, “Getting vaccinated is a simple yet profound way to care for one another, especially the most vulnerable.”

The pope said getting immunized is an “act of love.”

In an editorial, leaders with the National Association of Evangelicals and the Orthodox Union both wrote in favor of the shots.

Leaders within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints also have publicly supported the vaccine, saying in a statement, “The Church urges its members, employees and missionaries to be good global citizens and help quell the pandemic by safeguarding themselves and others through immunization.”

When asked how her Christian-based religious exemption holds up to these faith leaders, Espino said her faith is unique.

"As a Christian, I have the ability to interpret God‘s Word for me, and I believe that a matter of conscience for me not to get the vaccine,” Espino said.

Espino and Nagy are expecting to be put on unpaid administrative leave starting Sept. 30. If they don't get vaccinated, they'll likely be fired in October.

According to the latest COVID-19 Breakthrough Report from OHA, the COVID-19 case rate for unvaccinated individuals is four times higher than those who are fully vaccinated. OHA is reporting that "to date, 4.5% of all known breakthrough cases have been hospitalized (n=1036), and only 0.9% have died."

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