Rural Health Officials Push Back Against Biden’s Vaccine Mandate

VPM | By Kirk Siegler

Published September 27, 2021 at 9:07 AM EDT

Updated March 30, 2023

NOEL KING, HOST:

Long before the pandemic, rural American hospitals had trouble hiring doctors and nurses. And that is why health officials in rural areas say President Biden’s mandate that health care workers get vaccinated is just not going to work for them. Here’s NPR’s Kirk Siegler.

KIRK SIEGLER, BYLINE: In conservative rural America, the idea of the government imposing mandates doesn’t sit well, something Matt Shahan encounters every day at West River Health Services. It’s a 25-bed hospital he runs in Hettinger, N.D., population 1,000.

MATTHEW SHAHAN: People don’t want to be told to get a vaccine. They want to be able to make that decision for themselves and their families.

SIEGLER: He says some of his staff felt blindsided by the news that they’d have to get vaccinated or potentially face a $14,000 fine. Morale was already low.

SHAHAN: You know, you’re starting to hear the words early retirement and career changes a lot more often.

SIEGLER: West River Health currently has 30 open positions spread across its hospital in six rural clinics. And Shahan’s worried that a government mandate directed at the vaccine-hesitant will deter more people in his small town from applying, let alone others who might consider moving out to take a job in a place like Hettinger.

SHAHAN: Every little thing like that that gives somebody a question of, do I want to go through that to work there? – it creates another wrinkle that gets in the way of, do I want to live in a rural area anyway?

SIEGLER: Just retaining nurses is a big concern right now in states like Idaho, which has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the nation, and whose hospitals are now rationing health care. Abner King is CEO at Syringa Hospital in the town of Grangeville. Only about half of his staff is vaccinated, which he says is at least higher than the rural county as a whole.

ABNER KING: I have a number of staff, nurses and other staff, that are not comfortable taking the vaccine. And if it’s mandated, I don’t know how many of those we’ll lose. But what I do know is we can’t afford to lose a single one of them.

SIEGLER: When the mandate was announced, King sent out an email to his staff, urging them to take a deep breath and wait until the full details are known. After all, the rules are still being written, and lawsuits are likely looming.

Kirk Siegler, NPR News, Boise.

(SOUNDBITE OF THE MARTINIS’ “HUNG OVER”) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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Kirk Siegler

As a correspondent on NPR's national desk, Kirk Siegler covers rural life, culture and politics from his base in Boise, Idaho.

His beat explores the intersection and divisions between rural and urban America, including longer term reporting assignments that have taken him frequently to a struggling timber town in Idaho that lost two sawmills right before the election of President Trump. In 2018, after the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history, Siegler spent months chronicling the diaspora of residents from Paradise, exploring the continuing questions over how – or whether – the town should rebuild in an era of worsening climate-driven wildfires.

Siegler's award winning reporting on the West's bitter land use controversies has taken listeners to the heart of anti-government standoffs in Oregon and Nevada, including a rare interview with recalcitrant rancher Cliven Bundy. He's also profiled numerous ranching and mining communities from Nebraska to New Mexico that have worked to reinvent themselves in a fast-changing global economy.

Siegler also contributes extensively to the network's breaking news coverage, from floods and hurricanes in Louisiana to deadly school shootings in Connecticut. In 2015, he was awarded an international reporting fellowship from Johns Hopkins University to report on health and development in Nepal. While en route to the country, the worst magnitude earthquake to hit the region in more than 80 years struck. The fellowship was cancelled, but Siegler was one of the first foreign journalists to arrive in Kathmandu and helped lead NPR's coverage of the immediate aftermath of the deadly quake. He also filed in-depth reports focusing on the humanitarian disaster and challenges of bringing relief to some of the Nepal's far-flung rural villages.

Before helping open the network's first ever bureau in Idaho at the studios of Boise State Public Radio in 2019, Siegler was based at the NPR West studios in Culver City, California. Prior to joining NPR in 2012, Siegler spent seven years reporting from Colorado, where he became a familiar voice to NPR listeners reporting on politics, water and the state's ski industry from Denver for NPR Member station KUNC. He got his start in political reporting covering the Montana Legislature for Montana Public Radio.

Apart from a brief stint working as a waiter in Sydney, Australia, Siegler has spent most of his adult life living in the West. He grew up in Missoula, Montana, and received a journalism degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

See stories by Kirk Siegler