Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat, issued one of the nation's first vaccine mandates for health-care workers in August. With days to go before the deadline, the issue was far from settled at Dayton General Hospital, according to CEO Shane McGuire. "Dozens of McGuire’s employees were still marked as unvaccinated. At least 15 were in the process of applying for religious or medical exemptions, a few had already quit in protest, and many more were facing termination unless they decided to vaccinate against the coronavirus in the next five days before the mandate went into effect," Saslow reports. "McGuire liked to refer to his small staff as a family, and many in fact were family, but it had been splitting in two since the beginning of the year, when exactly 50 percent of the hospital’s few hundred employees chose to be vaccinated and 50 percent refused."

Read the full article about rural healthcare workers and COVID vaccine mandates by Heather Chapman at The Rural Blog.