About 50 employees of Essentia Health, an upper-Midwest hospital chain, didnβt go to work Wednesday.
But it wasnβt an early start to the Thanksgiving holiday for them. They were fired for refusing to get flu shots, NBC News reported.
Itβs part of a growing trend for hospitals to require flu shots for workers.
βItβs a patient safety issue,β said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University and a spokesman for the Infectious Diseases Society of America. βItβs so that we do not give flu to our patients.β