COVID-19 vaccine mandates have put some vital U.S health and safety institutions in a tough spot after cutting personnel who didn’t comply.

Overlapping federal mandates for military personnel, state mandates for health care workers, and other private mandates have created an increasingly difficult situation in the face of the omicron variant as numbers continue to surge in some states due to the much greater transmissibility of the variant.

Various states issued vaccine mandates for health care personnel in August, including California; Colorado; Illinois; Maryland; Rhode Island; New Mexico; Washington, D.C.; New York; Maine; Pennsylvania and New Jersey, with more to follow in the months after that.

But as thousands of health care workers faced termination over their refusal to comply, President Biden deployed over 1,000 military doctors, nurses, and medics to cover the shortage in the face of the omicron variant, which may further strain military health care services.  

“FEMA is deploying hundreds of ambulances and EMS crews to transport patients,” Biden said Monday during a call with the National Governors Association. “We’ve already deployed emergency response teams in Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, Vermont, New Hampshire, and New Mexico. We’re ready to provide more hospital beds as well.”

New York already has recorded 90% capacity in a number of hospitals, halting elective procedures to focus on the surge. The state terminated or furloughed around 32,000 health care workers at nursing homes, hospitals, and other health providers as of Dec. 21, according to data provided to Fox News.

“We have a massive nursing shortage,” Eric Smith, the statewide field director for the New York State Nurses Association, told the New York Daily News last month. “We have a vacuum in the double and triple digits all across the New York area.”

Massachusetts and New Jersey are among the states seeing spikes. Vaccine mandates in those states also led to hundreds of firings and resignations.

Some governors, such as Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker deployed National Guard members to help support hospitals, but even the Guard has faced its own loss of personnel due to the federal vaccine mandate.

Five governors called on the Pentagon to rescind the vaccine mandate for National Guard members, while Texas Gov. Greg Abbott outright refused to enforce it.

“As Governor of Texas, I am the commander-in-chief of this State’s militia,” Abbott wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. “In that capacity, on October 4, 2021, I ordered the Adjutant General of Texas to comply with my Executive Order GA-39.”

“If unvaccinated guardsmen suffer any adverse consequences within the State of Texas, they will have only President Biden and his Administration to blame,” he explained.