JOPLIN, Mo. – Mercy Hospital announced today it’s requiring its employees to get the COVID-19 vaccine. We spoke with Mercy officials about the new policy.
Mercy Joplin announced a new policy today that will require all Mercy employees to be vaccinated by September 30th. President Jeremy Drinkwitz says it wasn’t something they decided lightly, but after seeing the impacts of COVID first hand, felt it was what they needed to do. “We can’t advocate for our community and lead if we’re not leading by example and so, while there is a lot of challenges ahead of us, we feel like this is the best thing for us to do to protect our patients, which is our number one goal as we treat them going forward.”
As for employees who don’t want to get vaccinated, there are some options available. “So we have a couple of avenues, one, we do have some ability for some religious exemptions, there’s obviously some medical exemptions that will be approved by physicians, if people just choose not to do that, there’s an employment process we follow at that point.”
The policy will apply to all Mercy locations, not just Joplin. Drinkwitz says he knows a number of people, including mercy employees, have been getting what he says is bad information about the vaccine, leading to some not wanting to get it. “We have to push our people to the right direction to protect our patients, we’ve got to push them to make a decision, but we’re going to give them the right information to learn and hopefully change their mind because a lot of them have bad information and wrong information.”
Drinkwitz says the community can help out as well. “We need our community to stand with us, but we also need them to do the right thing which is protect themselves and get the vaccine.”
We did reach out to Freeman Health System. Officials there released a statement saying in part that they are closely monitoring the COVID-19 situation but currently are not issuing a policy requiring COVID vaccinations for employees.
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