Fired health worker hopes for 'little bit more outcry' over BC's continuing COVID-19 vaccine mandate

An Okanagan health worker who was fired during the COVID-19 crisis has renewed her plea for the vaccine mandate to be dropped in British Columbia.

Terri Perepolkin, previously a lab technologist at Vernon Jubilee Hospital, was one of about 2,500 health workers fired in the fall of 2021 for refusing to comply with Dr. Bonnie Henry’s vaccination order.

Now, years down the line, BC is the only province in Canada to have retained the mandate, despite efforts to have it removed.

Speaking to NowMedia video host Jim Csek, Perepolkin said she personally knows “hundreds” of health workers in the Okanagan who have been affected by the mandate.

She said there were “many, many, many more” than 2,500 workers lost with the mandate because an unknown number also “retired early or quit.”

“It's been two and a half years since we've had thousands of health care workers sitting on the sidelines waiting to get back to work, and we're watching the health care crisis and all of the closures,” she said.

“We just want to see our health care workers, who are trained and fully capable of working, get hired back so we can help the public.”

The BC government has repeatedly said it will not lift its mandate, with Premier David Eby last week contrasting himself with BC Conservatives Leader John Rustad, who has pledged to rehire and potentially even compensate the workers.

Eby said it was “completely bizarre” that Rustad would want to “reward the people who refused to get vaccinated.”

The province has also rejected the claim that there is a link between the firing of the workers and the staffing crisis engulfing the health system.

“In order to protect the province’s most vulnerable and the overall health care system, COVID-19 vaccination requirements for health care system workers continue to be in place,” the Ministry of Health told NowMedia late last year. Its position has not changed.

BC United Leader Kevin Falcon, however, has, like Rustad, called for the workers to be rehired.

The party’s shadow health minister told NowMedia last week that, while “every other jurisdiction is doing everything it can to avoid a health care crisis,” BC was sticking to its “stubborn refusal” to bring back the fired workers.

She also pointed to the province’s decision to send cancer patients south to Washington State, which does not have a vaccine mandate.

Perepolkin said that, “at this point,” she doesn’t think the mandate “is about science.”

She said she wonders whether the province would behave differently if “a hospital in Vancouver … lost their emergency services” due to a shortage of staff, as happens regularly in the Interior.

Meanwhile, Perepolkin has been forced to sell the home she thought she’d spend the rest of her life in, pull her kids out of their “expensive” dance classes and start growing her own food.

But, she said, she’s making the best out of life, despite missing the job she did for 17 years.

She added that she would like to hear from the public, health care workers and MLAs through the United Health Care Workers of BC group, of which she is a member.

With more help, she said, “this elephant in the room” could be addressed.

“All of these people who got fired, they're skilled, trained, have everything – it would be such an easy way to bring people back,” she argued.

She added: “Now that the public knows about it, maybe there will be a little bit more outcry.”