COVID Anti-Vaxxers Aren’t a MAGA Death Cult — It’s Worse Than That
timjwise.medium.com
Deathbed regrets from vaccine resisters speak volumes about the brokenness of conservatism

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/p4kcwi/we_cannot_stretch_anymore_hospital_leaders_on/

It's interesting to see r/medicine and some of the other medical subreddits start to radicalise against antivaxxers. Moral injury and secondary-exposure PTSD are already huge killers in the field. The normal moral context behind normal cases in an ER or ICU really does a number on staff, and now they've got a very strong ethical dilemma. Their sickest patients are either lemming terrorists who were fine with murdering everyone to disprove germ theory or they're the victims of those terrorists. While dying of a virus they don't believe in, those terrorists will still push their bullshit and expect sympathy from someone who has spent a year in a plague warzone watching people die.

The professional subreddits are slowly but surely beginning to turn hard against COVID deniers. Mods ban them if they post, commenters are more vocal about the situation and now understand "do no harm" with moral nuance similar to a medic's "do no harm, do know harm". As further variants and waves batter a wounded field full of wounded people who have already began striking against their hospitals, it's going to be a fascinating time to keep an eye on the medical community

  • ICU_Throwaway [comrade/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    now understand “do no harm” with moral nuance similar to a medic’s “do no harm, do know harm”

    I wish I’d learned this before the pandemic.

    • happybadger [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      I mean I became a combat medic because I was excited to be a noncombatant under the Geneva Convention that had to treat anyone in front of me. It's a field that preys on tunnel vision compassion and that's almost always the right call in normal times. To me the pandemic is triage mode but psychic beyond physical. As long as the antivaxxers exist, as long as that ideology is enabled through coddling them, harm is being done. More harm is being done than anyone in Guantanamo Bay could have dreamed of. There's just that insane disconnect of expecting civility and finding none which liberals discovered with Trump. The abstraction of the harm being done puts it in a fundamentally different conditional framework that we don't have an ethical model for beyond approximating it to other mass casualty situations where the people you're tagging aren't causing the mass casualty incident while you treat them or the opioid epidemic where there are sympathetic reasons for their addiction.

      • ICU_Throwaway [comrade/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        the pandemic is triage mode but psychic beyond physical. As long as the antivaxxers exist, as long as that ideology is enabled through coddling them, harm is being done.

        Yes, you put it perfectly. I know a number of acquaintances who only got vaccinated after a loved one died of covid. Like that article said, they thought they were immune to this until their husband or dad was dead. At this point, I think most antivaxxers are going to have to suffer directly before they get with the program.

        If someone winds up in one of my beds, then I’m taking care of them, but anyone who woke up every day and decided to make this pandemic worse is at the bottom of our list for getting into one of those beds.

        There are good people who they harmed that deserve treatment before them. When I look at an antivaxxer, I see all the people they murdered.