Not to post on more-or-less the same topic twice in a row, but this is pretty great. This hospital in Arkansas gets swamped with requests for vaccine exemptions, due to the use of fetal cell lines in the process of making the vaccines.

"This was significantly disproportionate to what we've seen with the influenza vaccine," Matt Troup, president and CEO of Conway Regional Health System, told Becker's Hospital Review in an interview Wednesday.

"Thus," Troup went on, "we provided a religious attestation form for those individuals requesting a religious exemption," he said. The form includes a list of 30 commonly used medicines that "fall into the same category as the COVID-19 vaccine in their use of fetal cell lines," Conway Regional said.

The list includes Tylenol, Pepto Bismol, aspirin, Tums, Lipitor, Senokot, Motrin, ibuprofen, Maalox, Ex-Lax, Benadryl, Sudafed, albuterol, Preparation H, MMR vaccine, Claritin, Zoloft, Prilosec OTC, and azithromycin.

and

Employees are asked to attest that they "truthfully acknowledge and affirm that my sincerely held religious belief is consistent and true" and that they do not and will not use the medications and any others like them.

The intent of the form is twofold, Troup says. First, the hospital wants to ensure that staff members are sincere in their stated beliefs, he said, and second, it wants to "educate staff who might have requested an exemption without understanding the full scope of how fetal cells are used in testing and development in common medicines."

Good job.

Two links: 1 in 500 Americans have died of Covid, and it's much higher among vulnerable groups. That's pretty stunning.

But then second, this idiotic op-ed: In my community, Biden's vaccine mandates could put more lives at risk. The reasoning goes that this community is already been devastated by the Delta variant, and the hospitals are currently overwhelmed. Therefore a vaccine mandate - specifically the part about workers at medical facilities - will leave them shortstaffed and unable to care for this surge.

I've heard the same conversation in Heebieville, actually - pre-mandate, the hospital stated that they were not requiring nurses to be vaccinated because they are caught between nursing shortages and the science and feel like they can't lose anyone else to staffing. (But also: I'm not convinced that nurses will quit at the same rates if the mandate comes from Biden as opposed to their local hospital.)

The other variable is that it's still kind of mysterious why Covid waves seem to have this 2-3 month trajectory, so it is true that the author's little town will have some breathing room at some point, even without a mandate. But does he really think that the mandate would go over better if we wait a month? What the hell is the end game if we don't actually get people vaccinated?

I am definitely in the contingent of Americans who has run out of patience and does not feel like humoring anti-vaxxers anymore. There's no coaxing them to play along. You have to just mandate the vaccine, and strategically requiring medical workers to get vaccinated is truly just the least gesture of sanity.