A hospital system in Arkansas is making it a bit more difficult for staff to receive a religious exemption from its COVID-19 vaccine mandate. The hospital is now requiring staff to also swear off extremely common medicines, such as Tylenol, Tums, and even Preparation H, to get the exemption.
The move was prompted when Conway Regional Health System noted an unusual uptick in vaccine exemption requests that cited the use of fetal cell lines in the development and testing of the vaccines.
“This was significantly disproportionate to what we’ve seen with the influenza vaccine,” Matt Troup, president and CEO of Conway Regional Health System, told Becker’s Hospital Review in an interview Wednesday.