Manitowoc County resident Jeanette Deschene had been working remotely for Advocate Aurora Health for two years when the system ordered its employees to be vaccinated for COVID-19.

She refused and was fired.

“I really thought that this was a human right to be able to choose what you wanted to do,” said Deschene, who for a total of eight years helped patients get financial assistance for their bills.

The 38-year-old’s firing was in October 2021, when U.S. deaths from the pandemic exceeded 752,000 and Badger State hospitals were overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients. Wisconsin health systems, citing patient safety, publicly announced their employee vaccination mandates. Worker protests, some led by Deschene, and announcements of the termination or departure of hundreds of employees made news.

All of that has quietly changed.

In mid-2023, without public announcements, Wisconsin health systems ended the mandates.

“Given the unpopularity of mandates in general and the rescinding of them across the country, including federal government agencies, I am not surprised that they were rescinded,” said Ajay Sethi, a public health professor and COVID-19 researcher at UW-Madison. “I do believe that health care workers should follow the recommendation to stay up to date with COVID-19 vaccination because it protects their health and also helps reduce absenteeism from work. If high levels can be achieved without a mandate, then that’s great.”

Deschene said that when former co-workers told her about the reversal, “it was a slap in the face.” Being fired, she said, “completely overturned my career and where I thought my life was going.”

Milwaukee-based Froedtert, which sees more than 2 million patients per year and no longer has a mandate, did not respond to calls and emails seeking comment.

Systems confirming to Wisconsin Watch that they had reversed their mandates:

Advocate Aurora, which has 16 Wisconsin hospitals, announced its mandate in August 2021 and soon fired or saw the departure of 440 employees. The mandate ended in June 2023.

UW Health, a system affiliated with UW-Madison that has more than 24,000 employees, announced its mandate in August 2021 and ended it in September 2023. Fewer than 10 employees were fired for not complying with the mandate.

Marshfield Clinic Health System imposed its mandate in late fall 2021 and ended it in August 2023. Less than 1% of the employees, who now exceed 10,000, were fired or left their jobs because of the mandate.

Iowa-based UnityPoint Health, which has Madison-area operations including Meriter Hospital, announced its mandate in August 2021 and ended it in September 2023.

The systems would not say whether they have rehired employees who were fired for not complying with the mandates. They cited the lessening of the pandemic as a public health threat for why they rescinded their mandates.

Aurora, in a statement, described “a significant decrease in severe illness and death from COVID.”

The health systems also pointed to two developments in May: the end of the federal declaration of the epidemic as a public health emergency and the end of federal regulations requiring health care worker vaccination.

“In alignment with the latest (federal) guidelines and health industry best practices across the country, we have determined at this time that a strong recommendation for COVID-19 vaccination would be most effective,” said UW Health spokesperson Sara Benzel.

Dropping the mandates also removed one barrier to overcoming worker shortages. As of 2022, Wisconsin hospitals had about 8,000 open full-time-equivalent positions out of 114,000 available positions, the Wisconsin Hospital Association reported this month.

Sethi said the lack of mandates won’t necessarily increase the risk that patients will be infected with COVID.

“Patients, especially those vulnerable for severe illness, should want health care workers, visiting friends and family members around them to be up to date on COVID-19 vaccines, but they should remember that current vaccines are unable to block transmission,” he said.

Health care settings also use masking, isolation of infected patients and other techniques to reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission, Sethi said. “When you have infection control practices in place, a mandate for a vaccine is unlikely to have much additional value in protecting patients.”

COVID-19 vaccinations have prevented millions of deaths across the globe, according to estimates by university researchers, but transmissions still occur. About 6.9% of U.S. adults reported having symptoms of “long COVID,” which can involve fatigue, as well as respiratory and neurologic symptoms.

The vaccines have been found to be safe: More than 13 billion doses have been given worldwide, and serious reactions are extremely rare, according to the World Health Organization.

As anyone knows who has been vaccinated against COVID-19 — and still been infected, even multiple times — the vaccines have not eliminated virus transmission. But they have been shown not only to reduce serious illness and death from COVID-19, but also make transmission less likely and reduce the chances of developing long COVID.

For Deschene, being fired because of a mandate helped spur her to run for a state Senate seat. She finished third in the August 2022 three-person Republican primary for the seat held by Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, R-Oostburg.

Now a bartender considering other career options, Deschene still decries the mandates and misses her Aurora job.

“I wish nobody would have to go through that,” she said.

This article first appeared on Wisconsin Watch and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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