A heart-wrenching process to fire a handful of San Francisco firefighters has been unfolding before the city’s fire commission. The reason? They are vaccination refusers.
The city mandated a year ago that by October 13, 2021, all its employees must be vaccinated against Covid-19 or risk losing their jobs. A medical condition or “sincerely held” religious belief might merit an exception in some cases. But that would not work for some jobs, such as first responders.
The fire chief observed that unvaccinated responders could not be dispatched on some calls, and it would be “not operationally sound for us to not permit all of our members into a scene.” Nonetheless, 1 percent of the department’s employees (17 out of 1,735) refused to comply. When the October deadline passed, termination proceedings were initiated for 13 of them. Since then, the refuseniks have been appearing at hearings before the fire commission to plead for their jobs. These hearings have dragged on for months and have become chillingly contentious; one commissioner has resigned in disgust.
In California, public employees who are subject to discipline or dismissal are entitled to a hearing before their employer’s governing body, the fire commission in this case. Usually, these hearings are held in closed session to protect the employee’s privacy. But the employee has the right to demand an open hearing.
San Francisco’s anti-vaxxer firefighters are opting for the open hearings, and most of them bring along a phalanx of like-minded supporters who, it turns out, have a right to testify as members of the public. Thus, the hearings have dragged on for months, while the commissioners listen to hours of vitriol, outrage and accusations that have tended to laser in on “tyranny,” “God-given rights,” “natural immunity,” and a litany of conspiracy theories evidencing government perfidy.
As I have followed this, a tickle in the back of my mind kept suggesting that not too long ago I had read something interesting about vaccination. Perhaps in The New Yorker? A dive into the magazine’s archives turned up the issue of May 19, 2021, with a review of a book (“Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer”; Riverhead) that explores the reasons why members of the human species die.
The book’s author, Steven Johnson, observes that for as long as humans have been on the planet, our average life expectancy has been around 35 years. Until, that is, it began edging up in the 1700s and 1800s, and then exploded beginning in the 1920s, after the Spanish flu epidemic following World War I faded out.
Johnson’s book explores the reasons why longevity remained static for millennia, then more than doubled in so short a time. He identifies specific advances in science, technology and society that he quantifies to account for how much longer people live today than even their quite recent forebears did.
Many of these achievements are what you would expect: pasteurization, antibiotics, anesthesia and angioplasty, as well as the AIDS cocktail.
But the “big three,” the troika he credits for saving literally billions of lives, surprised me. They are artificial fertilizer, hygienic plumbing and vaccines. Vaccines! Makes so much sense.
Were it not for vaccines, the thinking goes, most of us alive today would not be here at all, because so few of our ancestors would have managed to get themselves born, and a large share of those who did would not have survived long enough to reach the age of procreation.
I am amazed that people eschew vaccination on the belief that their constitution makes them too strong to be susceptible to Covid. San Francisco’s reactionary Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone refuses today to say whether he has been vaccinated, but early on, after the vaccine became available, he pontificated (pun intended) that he did not need the vaccine because of his strong constitution. So much for tending the flock!
Getting back to the firefighters who want their jobs but will not get vaccinated, my view is that first responders, paramedics in particular, are part of the medical profession. They are frequently the first ones who treat us in the event of an injury or illness emergency. They make decisions that can affect directly whether we survive or die.
If it’s me on the gurney, I do not want those decisions being made by people who are so stupid they can’t figure out that we all have a societal obligation to protect each other from infectious diseases. We should be able to take for granted that the paramedic hovering over us has been vaccinated.
The fire commission in San Francisco agrees. So far, it has confirmed the dismissal of every firefighter who has appeared before it. Good for the commissioners, I say.
A 40-year veteran of the fire service responded in a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle that “…the exact job of a firefighter is public safety… If you don’t care enough about the public to get your vaccination, get another job; your heart isn’t into the one you have.” Amen.
Inverness resident Wade Holland has been in the public sector in West Marin for 51 years.