Originally published at: MSNBC's doctor suggests unvaxxed patients go to the back of the line | Boing Boing
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Didn’t this already happen in function last year. I feel like I’m living in a crappy Groundhog Day. Anyone unvaxxed at this point is probably neglecting medical advise to begin with why should medical professionals even trust those patients?
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Perhaps in addition to pursuing research and therapies to stamp out Covid we could get Big Science to pursue the same for ignorance, selfishness and stupidity? I would gladly throw my tax dollars towards that.
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Oh man, you tore a laugh from my body with this. I desperately needed it this morning.
Thank you. 
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If they whine and cry about it, just remind them that the free market had decided that they’re much riskier as customers than vaxxed up folks because it’s 100% true. Dead people can’t pay bills, people with long covid will have a more difficult time being able to pay bills.
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I can get behind this, and the comparison to organ donation is very apt. People want to do things against medical advice, they should have to suffer the consequences rather than taking resources away from people who did everything right. There’s precedent for this already, let’s do it.
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I’d rather get them to sign a waiver and remind them it’s the only way to guarantee their freedom (from treatments they don’t believe will work/are the right choice for themselves):
It they’d put half the energy into this than they seem to devote to fake vaccine cards, religious exemptions, and other means to avoid regulations and mandates, HCW would probably have fewer headaches.
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This and…
I think a totally viable campaign to get people vaccinated is to announce that the government has plans to withhold all vaccines now for anyone except as boosters. No more first doses are available. The gov’t is shipping the rest to far away countries. Why you ask?
When all the “you can’t force me” crowd realizes the government is withholding something that is a GOD GIVEN RIGHT! they will lose their minds and demand vaccines.
This would have to be planted in Qnuts and insanereddit sorts of nooks and crannies. But the only way they will move is if they think they’re stickin’ it to the man.
Just spit ballin’ here.
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IIRC, they have triage protocols on who is helped first and how, so I guess just stick with that? IIRC if you have two patients and can only help one, but both will die with out help, you help the one most likely to survive.
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Americans are at “sympathy burn-out” for the anti-vaxx crowd, evidence is in vast amounts.
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MSNBC’s doctor suggests unvaxxed patients go to the back of the line
Yeah, I agree with this, but at this point, they are the line. With Omicron emerging, the vaxxed are seeing a massive drop in all symptoms and breakthrough infections. As Ol’ Handsome Joe says, this is now a pandemic of the unvaccinated.
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Terrified Americans, “We can’t have single-payer health care! That would lead to “Death Panels”!”
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I’m in complete agreement with this doctor. Unless the patient has a legitimate reality-based (sorry fundies) reason for not getting vaccinated sending them to the back of the line for ICU treatment is perfectly in line with medical ethics.
For greater effect, tell them Biden is prioritising PoC for vaccinations. That will get the white supremacist covidiots demanding to be first in line for the jab.
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I’m going to go one further:
If they need an ICU bed for someone who has had some non-COVID related problem (like a stroke, a heart attack, a hangnail, whatever) they just unplug a vented unvaxxed COVID patient and put them in the parking lot for their family to claim.
No more letting people die because they are taking up all the medical resources.
Heck, I’m OK with removing them from treatment (let’s not mince words: killing them) just so the doctors and nurses can get a break. I no longer have any concern for them. They could have gotten vaccinated; they didn’t.
Now, in fairness: we need to announce this policy ahead of time, to give one last chance for people to get their vaccines. And yeah, I know I’m being optimistic here; but that’s the limit of my sense of fairness here.
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While all these plans sound great, speaking for the medical providers who are already dealing with burnout, stress, exhaustion and burgeoning PTSD, forcing us into the role of judge, jury and executioner is a great way to make sure we walk out and leave you to your own devices. Satisfying to imagine, but the execution (pun intended) would be disastrous, not to mention inevitably turning into some form of “rich white unvaccinated face one standard, poor Black unvaccinated face a totally different one.” No, not good at all.
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Right? Even if the person who is dying is there because of their own choices, doesn’t make it easy to just “let them die.” We should not be asking our medical care professionals to make such choices (more than they already have to in the course of their jobs). We should be figuring out ways to get you guys all the resources you need as the pandemic grinds on, not asking you to decide who lives and who dies…
I don’t think acting like them will help us in this case. It will just be another mile of pavement on our road to a civil war.
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Things are easy. We should be able to get all the medical things that we need. Building new hospitals isn’t hard; if China can build new hospitals in days to weeks, we should be able to as well. It’s just a matter of political will. We’re 18 months in, those factories that Trump paid to spin up should be able to provide their supplies any day now… oh, wait.
But things are not really the limiting factor here.
People are. Nurses and doctors are the limiting factor here. Even if we started today, it would take years to train new nurses, and nearly a decade to train new doctors. Yes, we might be able to get people to help them out a bit, but… even that would take months or years of training.
I don’t know how many doctors we’ve lost in the last two years. I know we’ve lost about 20% of our nurses because we have run them ragged with no hope of reprieve. Not to mention how many doctors and nurses died of COVID (and other things that is due to the stresses that we’ve put them in).
And part of that is because we built our medical systems for profit instead of as a public service. As a society, we optimized the hospitals because we didn’t want to pay extra. We designed a system where we could get by with the least amount of people and things as possible, figuring that if anything bad happened, we could just send everyone to someplace that wasn’t affected. And now, there is no somewhere else, there are no doctors waiting in the wings, there are no nurse reserves. We optimized ourselves and everything was good until a pandemic happened. We need those fat reserves when everything is pretty good so that in times when things are bad (like now), we can get by.
I don’t think it’s fair to ask the doctors to identify who is next in line out the door. That should not be on the medical staff’s hands. Our doctors are not the judge jury and executioner; our nurses are not wearing the hangman’s hoods. It is inappropriate for them to do this.
But the fact is, we can’t treat everyone, and if we keep trying, we end up in a worse and worse situation.
And we are killing people, right now, because we are turning them away for medical care. It’s a decision on who should live and die already. We need to balance the needs of people who have a chance with medical care versus the people who are almost certainly terminal since we no longer have the luxury of allowing them to die on their own schedule. No, that’s not a doctor’s call. Perhaps it should be the administrators, since it’s their bean counting who got us into this mess.
This is a problem that was created by cold, hard accounting. And I don’t see any other way out of it, as much as I really, really desperately wish that there was.
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Thanks for telling me shit I already know, I guess.
Also, shit’s hard, so it’s easier to just create more cruelty… okay.
No. It will end up on the shoulders of medical care professionals, much as the current situation is. 
I believe @docosc when he says that’s how it will go down, since he’s a doctor.
More cruelty will not solve this problem. And I did not say that the solution was easy. I said that treating the anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorist as they treat us is not the solution. The solution is doing the hard work of creating a more humane society, which is not actually reinventing the wheel, but is more a matter of looking at solutions that already exist and pushing to adopt that.
We could, you know, try moving away from that shit?
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This would be a real card that they could use and share with others who follow conspiracy theories and anti-science media outlets.
The problem is, they want the card to skip vaccine mandates and masks but they wouldn’t show they have it when they actually need medical treatment. They seem to be opposed to the medical establishment right up to the point where they’re terribly sick.
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