Wave of ‘preventable’ anti-vax Covid deaths wreak havoc among U.S. health workers

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The writer is a contributing columnist of FT

Dr Nicole Linder’s voice breaks as she tells the story of Kathy, a ‘vivacious and gregarious’ patient who had to be sent home to die of Covid-19 because she refused to be vaccinated against her .

Kathy is one of the millions of Americans who have decided, for a variety of very different reasons, not to get the coronavirus vaccine. Linder, chief hospitalist at OSF Healthcare St Francis Hospital in Michigan’s remote Upper Peninsula, expressed pain and frustration at the death toll when I spoke to him: “This time is much more difficult for me than the last time. The suffering seems so unnecessary. It’s like the patients are tied to a railroad track and you can see the train coming and they can see it coming and …. . it just rolls over them. And all of this could have been avoided.

Some healthcare workers say they are struggling to cope with feelings of resentment and blame against unvaccinated patients that are behind the latest wave of Covid-19 in the United States.

President Joe Biden became the voice of national impatience on the issue when he demanded earlier this month that large U.S. companies require their employees to be vaccinated or undergo weekly Covid tests. 19. Only 65.2 percent of American adults are fully immunized.

Hospital workers pay a high price for the unvaccinated. Some people don’t appreciate risking their lives and putting loved ones at risk to care for those whose personal choices have made them sick. “People who suffer from liver disease from alcoholism or lung disease from smoking, the consequences of their choices only impact them,” says Jeanne Wirpsa, medical ethicist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago . She adds that the choice to refuse a vaccine has a much more direct impact on healthcare workers.

“They feel like there was something you could have done, why didn’t you do it?” You say you don’t believe in science and vaccines, but you want us to fix it, but if you don’t believe in science what are you doing here? ”

Healthcare workers saw the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel after the vaccines were introduced, so it’s even more painful to see it dying out now, Wirpsa says. “It crosses people’s minds, understandably, that ‘you made your bed now lie in it’.”

But ethicists like Wirpsa are clear that all sufferers should be treated equally. “We pay the same attention to the guy who shot the five-year-old as we do to the five-year-old,” she says. And she warns against grouping together all vaccine refusals because their motivations – and their policies – are very diverse.

“Not all unvaccinated are aggressive, violent anti-vaccines that spit in your face,” says Nina Redl, chaplain at Bryan Medical Center in Lincoln, Nebraska. Redl has been caring for Covid patients since the start of the pandemic. “They say, ‘I normally trust my pastor, my friends, they said it wasn’t a good idea. . . and I looked on the internet, there were 500 different opinions, I just didn’t know who to trust. I was scared and I closed. Redl holds support sessions for staff frustrated with vaccine resistance, to help them overcome compassion fatigue.

Some caregivers have refused the Covid vaccine themselves, and Redl notes that the reasons for their resistance are often as complicated as those for unvaccinated patients. Just condemning them doesn’t help, she said.

Redl and Wirpsa both claim that prioritizing vaccinated patients over unvaccinated patients is an ethical mistake. “People have the right to make their own very unhealthy decisions. . . that doesn’t mean we can’t deal with them, ”says Redl.

Treating people who are resistant to the vaccine “affects us in a very different way than someone who dies because they smoke too much,” she says. She notes that after 18 months of compulsory overtime, the new wave of Covid has been the last straw for some staff. Many have resigned, exacerbating an already severe shortage of healthcare workers.

Linder says she is “sick and tired” of all this unnecessary pain, but she is not angry. “You can’t watch people suffer like that and be mad at them.” But such heroic acts of compassion take a toll on medical personnel. We have asked them for the impossible for quite a long time.