Across the country, the Democrats’ policies have been backfiring big time. This time, a huge mistake in an unexpected place is causing serious problems for citizens.
While New York, California, and Democrat-run cities like Chicago are always in the news for their radical leftist policies backfiring, Maine isn’t. In fact, Maine is hardly in the national news at all, until now.
The state’s governor, Janet Mills, decided to follow the Democrat party line, imposing an emergency rule that required workers at health facilities in Maine be fully vaccinated against COVID by October 29, 2021.
Now, she is seeing the consequences of that mistake.
On December 8th, Governor Mills announced that she had activated members of the Maine National Guard to “help alleviate short-term capacity constraints at hospitals and maintain access to inpatient health care services for Maine people amid a sustained surge of COVID-19,” according to the state’s website.
This comes as Maine and the rest of New England are reportedly experiencing record hospitalizations due to the Delta variant of COVID, which the state’s website attributes to people who are “not fully vaccinated against COVID-19.”
As of December 8th, there were a record high of 379 people hospitalized with the coronavirus in Maine, which included 117 in critical care and 60 on ventilators.
Governor Mills signed a directive to address the strain on hospitals by activating 75 additional members of the Maine National Guard, which the state’s website says will be used in “non-clinical support roles to expand capacity at health care facilities” by:
- “providing support to nursing facilities and swing bed units that accept patients discharged from hospitals experiencing critical care capacity challenges. Enhancing the ability of these “decompression sites” to accept more patients will allow hospitals to safely discharge more individuals, relieving a bottleneck that will then allow hospitals to provide inpatient care for more people with COVID-19 and ensure delivery of health care for other serious health problems.”
- “helping administer monoclonal antibodies to prevent serious illness from COVID-19 and keep Maine people out of critical care, preserving intensive care unit (ICU) capacity. Under the Governor’s directive, members of the National Guard will deploy beginning next week to locations across Maine. These locations will be determined in the coming days in collaboration with the leadership of Maine’s health care systems. It is expected that members of the Guard will be deployed in these critical support staff roles through the end of January 2022, subject to need.”
The governor is also requesting help from the Federal COVID-19 Response Teams from the Biden Administration, which could include teams of Federal clinicians, physicians, nurses, and certified nursing assistants, that will supplement existing staff and members of the Maine National Guard to provide care for those with COVID.
“From the Ice Storm of ’98 to the COVID-19 pandemic, members of the Maine National Guard have always stepped up to serve our communities and our state, adapting to meet whatever challenges are in front of them. Today, in the midst of this sustained surge and with the potential for even more people to become sick and hospitalized, we are once again in need of their help,” said Governor Janet Mills. “I am activating the Maine National Guard, and, in consultation with our health care systems, will be deploying them to expand our hospitals’ ability to treat people with COVID-19 and other serious medical conditions.”
“I do not take this action lightly, but we must take steps to alleviate the strain on our health care system and ensure care for all those who need it,” she continued. “I am grateful to the members of the Guard and to our heroic health care workers for their tireless efforts. Just as they are stepping up, so, too, must Maine people. For your health, for the health of an elderly person, for the health of a child, for our health care workers, for the National Guard, get vaccinated, please. It may save your life or someone else’s.”
