Republican Governor Sununu of New Hampshire(interview a day before Adolf Biden's decree)
Sununu: No, well, look, we are not going to mandate vaccines, nobody wants to mandate vaccines, even Washington doesn't want to mandate vaccines. That's absolutely the wrong approach. You have to appreciate that there's a lot of folks that aren't vaccinated. A third or more of our population isn't vaccinated. It isn't one political party, it isn't one age demographic, although the older demographic seems to be much more vaccinated than the younger.
But as you go through that, you realize, you know, there are a lot of young women who are teachers or nurses that are concerned about the vaccine because they may get pregnant later on. And so you have to have the right message for them in terms of the safety as it pertains to fertility and things like that
And you want them to engage with their doctor to have those discussions. There are folks that, you know, for a variety of reasons. "Oh, I'll get it. I'll get the vaccine when I go and finally see my doctor." "Well, when's that?" "Well, maybe early next year?" No, you want to push them. They're willing to do it, but they're doing it, kind of. They're not doing it out of a lack of convenience.
Gov. Sununu: So you want to engage them on the messaging at that level. So I think that's why I really push the no stone unturned because a lot of folks are choosing not to get it for a whole spectrum of reasons. It isn't just one constituency or one issue. So when it comes to making sure that, look, this is, we're not going to get the whole, not everyone is going to be vaccinated tomorrow. If you start cutting off services and all of this sort of thing to the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated, you're just really accentuating the problem, right? You're creating the haves and the have nots and all of that.
Gov. Sununu: They are likely. Look, if a health care institution here wants to mandate the vaccine, they absolutely have the ability to do that. I've talked to many of those CEOs, and they all say that when that happens, they could lose up to 10 percent of their workforce, and they know that. Losing 10 percent of the health care workforce would be devastating to our health care system. So while it is their choice to do that, and I don't shun that at all, it is a factor. They have to understand the repercussions of doing that. And so, you know, one of the examples I'll give is that the federal government has mandated that nursing homes require the vaccine for nursing home staff. You know, in the case of our veterans home here in New Hampshire, we have 99 percent of our veterans in our veterans home, the residents, are vaccinated, right? That's wonderful. And about 80 percent, even higher, of the staff. We have one of the highest vaccinated staff.
If you start mandating a vaccine, maybe you get five or 10 staff that walk out the door that say, Look, I'm going to go work at Home Depot. I could get 20 bucks an hour working at Home Depot. What's more dangerous, having a vaccinated resident with an unvaccinated nurse or having a vaccinated resident with no nurse to care for them? Right. So it's not a black and white issue. You have to understand there are consequences, pushes and pulls, pros and cons to each side of this and every health care institution facility is different. And so they really are the ones that have to look at their staffing dynamics, their transmissivity rate, what it really would do to staffing. Maybe it would have no effect. That would be great, but some might. It might have a more significant effect which is why they really need to be making those decisions on a localized level.