Florida health official put on 2-month leave after urging staff to get vaccine

[Ohio Joe]

Florida is allowing its top public health official in Orlando to return to work after a two-month suspension related to an email he sent to his staff noting their abysmal COVID-19 vaccination rate and urging them to get vaccinated.

Dr. Raul Pino, the health administrator for Florida's Orange County, sent the email to public health employees on January 4 as the state was seeing a surge of COVID-19 cases amid the omicron wave of the pandemic. The email noted that less than half of the 568 employees at the county's public health office were fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Only 77 of them had gotten a booster shot, Pino added. He called the staff's vaccination rate "pathetic" and wrote that it was "irresponsible" not to be vaccinated at that point.

“I have a hard time understanding how we can be in public health and not practice it,” he wrote, according to Click Orlando.

The Florida Department of Health put Pino on administrative leave shortly after. "As the decision to get vaccinated is a personal medical choice that should be made free from coercion and mandates from employers, the employee in question [Pino] has been placed on administrative leave," FDOH Press Secretary Jeremy Redfern said in a statement on January 19. The FDOH said it would carry out an investigation to determine if "any laws were broken in this case."

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/03/florida-health-official-put-on-2-month-leave-after-urging-staff-to-get-vaccine/

Let them die. I mean it... If someone is stupid enough at this point to buy into the magat lie about vaccines... Fuck 'em, let them die, the more of them that die the better.

[Ocelot II]

1. A public health official is punished for encouraging a public health measure?

Just...