Leanne Honce, occupational therapist (top left), Dr. Joshua Nordine, GP (top right), Maeann Effa, RN, (bottom left) and Grace Effa, RN, (bottom right) are four Kelowna health workers sidelined by the province’s vaccine mandate. A year after the provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry first announced that unvaccinated health care workers would be laid off, those affected by the order are left on the sidelines and unable to help a health care system in crisis. Grace Effa and sister-in-law Maeann Effa were both employed at Kelowna General Hospital as registered nurses before being placed on leave in October 2021, which was later terminated because they remained unvaccinated. Grace worked on the COVID-19 ward while Maeann worked in the emergency department. And while nurses are leaving the healthcare sector in droves due to appalling working conditions, both look forward to the day they can return to work. “Nursing is a very demanding job and you don’t go into it without, I think, seeing it as a calling to be able to help people,” Grace told Castanet. “We both have the skills to do it. And it is so desperately needed in BC. and in Canada… We think we can meet that need. And it’s really sad that we can’t right now.” Since being released from KGH, both Grace and Effa have worked in private home nursing care in addition to odd jobs like bartending, shoveling snow, and painting. Maeann said the past year has been a long wait and she asked herself questions, “Am I waiting to be called back? Or am I following a different career path?” Moving to another province, or even the US, is possible but not under consideration at this time. “I want to serve my community here, make a difference here,” Maeann said. I could go abroad to make more money, but that’s not really for me. I want to be here and serve this place.” British Columbia remains an outlier, along with Nova Scotia, in maintaining vaccine mandates for health care personnel. In Ontario, individual hospitals have the power to establish their own mandates, and some have continued to do so. About 2,500 British Columbia health care workers, 900 in the Internal Health region, were laid off last year for not vaccinating. As this makes up less than two per cent of health authority workers in BC, returning them to work is not the solution to a health care staffing crisis, the ministry of health said in a statement to Castanet. Grace and Maeann agree. But on a much smaller scale in a single department, they say they can help. “It was especially difficult seeing ERs around the province as an ER nurse and knowing that working even one or two staff a day makes a huge difference … and sometimes it’s life or death,” said Maeann. “I could see dozens of patients in a day. And that makes the difference.” Grace says she was drawn to nursing for the opportunity to do good and “bless people in the middle of their darkest day.” “And to take that away, knowing and seeing every change I make make such a positive difference in these individuals’ lives, it was really painful … there will be other nurses, but every nurse counts.” Dr. Joshua Nordine, a family physician at Rutland Medical Associates, was able to work and see patients in his private practice while remaining unvaccinated. But beyond that it is, practically, cut off from the rest of the health care system. He was fired from his position as a local rehab doctor and can no longer do things like order blood transfusions at the hospital for his family’s patients. If one of his patients ends up in a hospice, he can’t go see them. “You’ve been taking care of these patients for years, you know them, you know where they’ve been in life, you have an appreciation for their spiritual journey, if there is one. I strongly believe you can provide better care,” she said. “Hospitals, they have exemptions for unvaccinated family members visiting, but they won’t let a doctor come in and see someone.” At the end of the day, Nordine says “he’ll be fine” and can continue working in his private practice. But most other health care workers like Grace and Maeann don’t have the same choice, she noted. “But the boat is sinking right, health care is in freefall,” he said. “And when the boat sinks, you need everyone saved. You don’t start, you know, throwing people overboard — and here we are.’ Nordine is one of 11 plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed by the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms challenging the health care vaccine mandate. The lawsuit will be heard over ten days in November in the BC Supreme Court. He is also involved in a “Hire Back our Heroes” billboard campaign advocating for the mandate to be lifted. Grace and Maeann, meanwhile, say the BC Nurses Association is backing them in arbitration in an effort to get their jobs back. In a statement to Castanet, the union declined to comment on specifics, but confirmed that they are “actively representing nurses who have come forward seeking union support following their termination due to the vaccine mandate through the grievance process.” The BC Nurses Union is one of the few public sector unions to publicly oppose vaccine mandates, citing concerns about the impact on patient care. Leanne Honce worked for Interior Health as an occupational therapist in Kelowna for 22 years before she was fired for remaining unvaccinated. As a single mother of three teenage children, she would jump back into the health care workforce in a heartbeat if allowed. He agrees that calling in all unvaccinated staff won’t fix the health care system’s problems, but there is a need for all hands on deck right now. “We were already understaffed, with our frontline workers, you can see that Kelowna’s population is aging. It’s no surprise what was happening, but there were no plans for it,” he said. “And then to go ahead and lay off a bunch of people on top of already, a shortage of front-line workers, it just doesn’t make any sense.” Honce says since she was fired she’s tried to open a private care business, but it’s been an uphill battle when people aren’t used to paying for health care. “But they will have to get used to it very quickly, because the public system is not able to provide it.” On Thursday, the provincial government announced it was maintaining vaccination requirements against COVID-19. A pair of provincial health officer orders were updated and renewed on Monday. “The trajectory of the pandemic in the coming months is uncertain as there is still significant spread of the COVID-19 virus in the province and around the world,” the health ministry said in a press release. Mutations in the COVID-19 virus mean that vaccine protection has been significantly reduced. While two doses of the vaccine still provide protection against serious illness, the same cannot be said for viral infection. A large study published in April in the New England Journal of Medicine found that people who received two doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine had no protection against the Omicron variant after 20 weeks. People who received two doses of Pfizer had just 9% protection after 25 weeks. Moderna drops to 15% after 25 weeks. Booster doses greatly increase protection, but boosters are not required to be considered vaccinated in BC In a statement to Castanet, the Ministry of Health said that while health workers only need two doses to keep their jobs, they are encouraging boosters. “Health care facilities and health care providers provide care to our most vulnerable citizens who are at risk, so it is important that we maintain this important level of protection for them, which includes ensuring that our workers are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 virus,” said a spokesman for the ministry. “Vaccine mandates help protect the functioning of our overall health care system by protecting health care workers from each other and protecting those who use the system.” Dr. Nordine sees this response as a way to end the debate. “Dr. Nordine can see a cancer chemotherapist in his office all he wants, immunocompromised whatever, but a paramedic can’t be sent to 911?” He says. “BC has taken a very extreme approach during the COVID pandemic and this is the time we need to heal and come together and get people back to work.” “They can do it safely and we need to have that conversation.” The BC Liberal Party called on the BC NDP over the summer to reinstate unvaccinated health workers. “British Columbia is unlike the rest of the country in this regard,” said party leader Kevin Falcon. “We have a situation now that just warrants lifting the vaccine mandate immediately.” Kelowna General Hospital was operating at 132 percent capacity on Friday with just 12 COVID-19 patients in isolation.
