Legacy Health employees tell us hundreds of healthcare workers were denied their #COVID19 vaccine exemption.
They were emailed Monday. One respiratory therapist, Coleman Nagy, shared his letter with us.
How is the health system determining which exemptions will be honored:
If your exemption didn't meet the consistency/specificity criteria, your request was denied.
Nagy told: "your request was carefully reviewed and your request for religious exemption was denied because the information you provided does not meet one or more of the criteria.”
Another employee, Arnhild “Hildi” Espino, a vascular access specialist at Mt. Hood M.C. also had an exemption denied.
Hildi & Coleman submitted religious exemptions (below).
Hildi est. ~400-800 employees had their requests denied.
She's appealing the exemption process.
.@OurLegacyHealth is defending it's process/the exemption work group, saying "“Legacy has completed a thorough review of all employee requests for medical or religious exceptions...Legacy’s number one priority is patient and employee safety."
@OurLegacyHealth Legacy is now preparing to deal with the major hit to staffing levels.
"In anticipation of the potential impact to our staffing, Legacy has developed a series of contingency plans across all of our facilities to minimize the effect on patient care.”
ONA: "A small number of nurses have legit. reasons for filing exemption requests. ONA believes that hospital systems must take these exemption requests seriously, as required by state & federal law."
Hildi is non-denominational Christian.
"I believe that my body is a temple of the Holy Ghost, and I am therefore a product of that, and by putting something into my body that wasn’t meant to be is defiling my body."
Hildi also has concerns over the use of fetal cells in the making of vaccines, but several religious leaders, even those of who oppose abortion, are pro-vaccine.
"Producing vaccines that rely on these cell lines does not require new abortions, because the cells
reproduce themselves indefinitely in the laboratory."
A LOT more info on fetus cell lines:
“the vaccines themselves do not contain any aborted fetal cells.”
I’m going to put raw, emotional and, to some, difficult-to-watch video on KATU tonight.
We don’t normally do this, but we feel it’s vitally important we show the gun violence problem for what it is.
We want you to know Katie Guzenko. We want you to know he scar story.
There will be video of blood and of Katie in horror shortly after she was shot while driving.
There will be a "Bull Shit" that runs without a beep in our newscasts.
What we will show is real because you deserve to understand the story as reporters see it on the ground.
Today, Katie took her story to city council.
You can read a bit about what happened to her here:
South Portland renters say someone is, repeatedly, throwing some sort of explosive out their window/porch.
It's erupting on the busy walkway below.
Neighbors say, the latest incident happened on Friday night, when people were out enjoying their weekend.
Neighbors have gone to management/police but say change isn't happening soon enough. They want an immediate eviction.
Police did get the call about the Friday night incident but were busy with a homicide. PPBS says the apartment is dealing with it civilly, i.e. eviction.
The neighbors say this person/these people are throwing M-80s. Those are illegal except in certain circumstances.
PPB says it has no proof they are M80s but b/c no one has been hurt, there isn't really going to be a formal investigation.
JUST IN: We got video of Clack. Co. Elections on 5/19. We submitted a public records request for this Friday, when McLeod-Skinner's team formally complained, saying Rep. Schrader's observer was allowed to be inside an hour before Mc-Leod-Skinner's observer.
Rep. Schrader's team told me Friday that it was Clerk Sherry Hall who opened the door and allowed them inside, but Hall told us ""I don't know how someone got in at 7 [o'clock]."
One key, due to blurry ballots, there was elections work being done at 7am. Observers should've been allowed in.
County Chair Smith told people to observe the process which would go from at 7am-6pm daily.
But when McLeod-Skinner's observer showed up at 8AM, they weren't let in.
As of last night (latest update), Clackamas County says there are nearly 115k ballots. It's not clear if that's a finalized total or just known ballots at this point.
Clerk Sherry Hall previously said about 2/3 of ballots were blurry. If that 115k is number of cast ballots, that would potentially mean about 75k have blurry barcodes.