They just shrug their shoulders
Via Charles Pierce in Esquire, a doctor in Arkansas says what it’s like there:
The last day I worked wasn’t too bad. Had several people come in with symptoms or just to be tested. Mostly younger than 40. Of course zero vaccinations, and when I asked why, I don’t get the “cause the internet, cause screw the libs, I think it’s dangerous” excuses. I don’t get any excuses at all. They just shrug their shoulders and say they didn’t need it. It’s just part of their psyche now. Sun rises in the east, Jesus will return to judge the quick and the dead, you just don’t get vaccinated.
They didn’t need it, but now they have symptoms. shrug.
The ones that were negative, when I ask them if they are going to get vaccinated they look at me like I have three heads.
The positive ones sometimes have some regrets, one in particular started crying after we talked about intubation, CPR, and ECMO. The ones I send home often get mad when I tell them there’s not anything I can do for them.
I’ve resisted the temptation to put on their discharge instructions: “You didn’t listen to me about how not to get this, why would you listen now. Ask the internet when to return to the ED.”
When I was in college I did telemarketing for a while. In those jobs they give you a sheet of things to say to overcome objections when people don’t want to buy from you. But how do you overcome an objection when they don’t give you one? They just look at you [and] shrug [their] shoulders. I tried giving them the science. I tried mild anger and looking at everybody over my glasses like their disappointed father. They are just not gonna do it and nothing I say is going to change that so it makes me wonder whether I even need to keep trying.
I’ve gotten updates from lots of people in Missouri and Arkansas. Things are absolutely at their capacity. They’re talking about field hospitals again in Springfield and we are very close to running out of capacity for ECMO in Arkansas and Missouri. Last week a paramedic posted a whiteboard showing that every ICU in Arkansas was on divert. That means they are not accepting any transfers and critically ill patients will stay in the emergency department for the foreseeable future. None of which is safe for anybody.
None of this was inevitable. People who mock the very idea of vaccinations made it happen.
Updating to add Charles Pierce’s conclusion after the doctor’s account:
Goddammit, none of this had to happen. And it certainly doesn’t have to continue to happen. If you’re making a buck out there off telling people tales about the perils of the vaccines, or if you’re an idiot meat puppet from Fox News bothering the White House with stupid questions, just shut up and sit all your asses down. Get used to the fact that you’re going to hell, every damn one of you.
One interesting statistic I saw recently: among seniors (I think defined as 65+), the vaccination rate in the U.S. nationally is something like 89%.
When you consider that old people skew more GOP, that’s actually pretty good. A lot of old, Fox News watching conservatives are presumably getting the vaccine. Maybe reluctantly — perhaps their kids said “you don’t get to see the grandkids again until you do” — but they do it nonetheless.
But it goes to show that a lot of vaccine refusal is driven by the perception that, as the Arkansas doctor’s patients said, they don’t need it. Of course there’s a grain of truth there: young people do have lower risk. It’s just that even lower risk still makes it worthwhile to get vaccinated given the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine. (And I’m talking strictly from a self-interested perspective — obviously there’s even more reason to get vaccinated if you actually care about protecting other people, too.)
In a rare attempt to be an optimist, I’ll suggest that as more young people get COVID or know someone who does, it might start to move the needle. Yeah, I’m not good at being an optimist, sorry.
Here in TN, the nurse who gave me my first Pfizer dose proudly announced her unvaxxed status. It’s terrifying to live where people care so little about themselves or others–or are so damned bull-headed they’ll die to make a stupid point–or whatever the hell is going on here.
The only thing that makes me angrier are all the “Darwin award” people I meet. They’re still taking the innocent with them when they die, and some people want to be smug?
A nurse! That’s appalling – and proudly announcing it is even more so.
People in the medical field (and engineers) who are otherwise highly educated are shockingly reactionary in their politics and beliefs outside their narrow fields. :(
I love the “ask the Internet when to return to the emergency room” comment. :(
Screechy, that might be so, but if you look at the rates between GOP and Democrats, it is obvious party has a lot of role to play. I suspect a lot of older people are doing like my dad; they have a lifelong history of trusting the medical professionals. They love Trump, but ignore his medical advice, maybe even pretend he didn’t say it. My dad was going on raving about how great Trump was, then said “I just wish he’d wear a mask”.
The thought of dying in a particularly horrible manner can trump (pardon the expression) their love of the president in many ways.
The younger generation, raised on the internet and fed on a steady diet of “don’t trust experts, trust people who don’t know shit about the subject”, coupled with the typical young person’s sense of their own immortality, leads to not wanting to bother to go to the trouble of getting the vaccine.
Around here, Trump country solid, I saw all the old people wearing masks (well, 99.9% – every now and then there would not). These were mainly Trump voters. The young people, those below 55, only wore masks during the few weeks there was a mandate. A lot of our young people are Trump voters, but at least some of them are not, so party, while being a relatively reliable indicator, has to be tempered by other characteristics, such as age and socioeconomic status. And I never saw a person of color wearing masks, either. I have no idea why, unless their overall distrust of government (with good reasons).
It’s possible that some of the 65+ getting vaccinated are doing it because they remember what it is like to have diseases regularly making the rounds and the toll those diseases took. Maybe some of them even had those diseases.
As to the young – in graduate school I was a TA for a chemistry lab class. Students acted like they’re invincible and indestructable. Explain to them why the safety precautions, and they’re like, “oh, that won’t happen to me. I’m carefull. I’m always paying attention. etc.etc” Even when I could easily see that they weren’t careful and weren’t paying attention.
And then there was the coworker (postdoc) who didn’t see the need to keep the caps on the waste solvent carboys, claiming it didn’t affect him. And claiming that while standing right next to a carboy with its cap off, out of which organic solvents were evaporating into the air that he was breathing.
Wow.
Of course…my passion/obsession is road cycling. Which is how I will probably die, because all those 6,000 pound trucks people NEED for their trips to the corner store are deadly to pedestrians and cyclists.
I will say my favorite Covid-era sights were the amateur (not serious) cyclists riding the wrong way down major streets during rush hour in dark clothes, no helmets, no lights, but by gawd they had COVID masks on (even though there was not another human being around to infect or being infected by for blocks)