This is the 12th in a series of stories of people being fired from their jobs because they have declined to take the required Covid-19 vaccination. The identities of these workers are being kept confidential because they fear reprisal. More stories will be included in future editions of this series as it continues. Previous interviews in this series are listed and linked at the bottom of this story. Send your story to [email protected].
Jill is one of those medical workers in Anchorage who is preparing to lose her job. She has an autoimmune disorder and has had terrible reactions to vaccines in the past, reactions that included top-of-head to sole-of-feet hives.
But she’s doubtful the Anchorage hospital that employs her will give her a medical exemption, and so she’s ready to be fired. She just wants to see that termination in writing.
Jill is the young woman who started a support network of others like her in Anchorage. The group doesn’t have a name. It began with a group of 40 people who met at her home, but has grown by word of mouth to over 180. More request to join every day; they get her phone number from a friend and send her a text message, asking to be put on her email list. It’s informal, and it’s all about information sharing, especially scientific information.
There’s not much Jill can do for them. Their stories are a lot like hers, but each person has a unique situation, and each has to make their own decision about what to do in an era when they are being coerced, under threat of job loss, to take a medical treatment.
Jill has a note from her doctor, but that’s not likely to be honored, she said. There is some unknown board that will review her case. She had to fight to get that note, because her doctor was toeing the party line on Covid vaccinations and did a 180-degree switch on what he had recommended to her just months ago, when he told her not to get the vaccine. He all of a sudden had fallen in line with the group think about Covid-19.
She goes to work every day, keeps her mouth shut as she hears others being bullied about getting the Covid-19 vaccination, listens as healthcare workers insult those who aren’t vaccinated, and waits to find out if her medical exemption request will be honored. At night, she studies the studies, and those she finds valuable, she passes along to members of the group.
There are a lot of things that don’t make sense to Jill:
- Why patients who are in car accidents and come in with broken legs are placed in a Covid bed just because they tested positive for Covid upon admittance.
- Why every patient is tested, and yet for months on end none of the employees have been tested, and they are exposed to patients all day long every day.
- Why the medical exemption form has only two reasons a person can be exempted: They’ve had a previous dose of the vaccine and had an adverse reaction, or they are known to have an anaphylactic allergy to a component in the vaccine. With a vaccine like this, who knows?
For Jill, she actually carries an epi-pen with her at all times, because her allergies are sudden and significant.
“There are a lot of people in the same boat. They have a medical reason, an auto-immune condition, they’re pregnant, or it’s simply their choice — they don’t want it,” she said.
Jill wants people to know that the vaccines being used are actually not completely approved. Only one version of the Pfizer vaccine for Covid is approved, and it’s not the version most people are getting.
The FDA says that the Pfizer vaccine Comirnaty has the same formulation as the Emergency Use Authorization Pfizer vaccine being used and is interchangeable. The FDA also says: “Providers can use doses distributed under EUA to administer the vaccination series as if the doses were the licensed vaccine. For purposes of administration, doses distributed under the EUA are interchangeable with the licensed dose.”
That is not good enough for Jill. She wants more studies and more time.
“I want to see who is funding the studies, and not studies that go back to Bill and Melinda Gates,” she said.
And so, Jill has become the go-to ear for the more than 180 medical professionals in Anchorage — and a few pilots and business owners — who want people to know there is a dissenting voice in medicine.
“We are not the only people struggling. There’a a good 40 percent of the population that is in our boat,” she said. “They are standing up for what they want done to their bodies.”
They primarily communicate by email. They don’t have a Facebook group, purposefully. The group isn’t some kind of insurrection or union, but more about support.
“They feel so isolated. They want a community. I, too, felt isolated, because I’m in the one percent of the population that has had serious adverse reactions to vaccines. This group started when a few of us went out for coffee and I discovered that I was not alone,” Jill said.
She disputes that doctors are being spit on by angry Covid-denier patients, a story that has circulated in the mainstream media.
“We are actually the ones being bullied,” she said. “People need to hear both sides of this.”
Read: Part 1: Nurse losing job, after her medical exemption refused
Read: Part II: Pharmacist losing job
Part III: Southcentral Foundation employee losing job Oct. 15 over shot refusal
Part IV: Dozens of Alaskans come forward to tell their stories of being fired for not getting the shot
Part V: Military man getting discharged in Alaska for not taking jab
Part VI: Nurse says she sees too many blood clotting cases associated with jab, so she’s not taking it
Part VII: Bethel police investigator gets put on leave, won’t be returning to the force
Part VIII: Alaska Native man says unvaccinated patients are getting the shaft
Part IX: Sophies choice, between Moderna vaccine or childbearing?
Part X: Respiratory therapist describes growing underground of workers
Part XI: Supervisor says employees facing few options
Part XII: Founder of medical underground speaks about workers
Read: ICU Nurse: Let’s stop demeaning the unvaccinated
Read: Doctor says hospitals are not in crisis, not rationing care
Read: My doctor fired me because I won’t take the vaccine
