The following was written by Rachel Clarke, a palliative care doctor in the NHS and published by The Daily Mail.
Also https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/i...cine-n2l8r2wcj
I suppress a howl of disbelief. She would rather die than get a Covid vaccine
Some 75 per cent of those suffocating in intensive care with the coronavirus are unvaccinated
About 850 people have died with Covid-19 in the past seven days in the UK
She is young, ashen and fighting for her life, and all I can offer is morphine. Recent chemotherapy has sent her blood count crashing. The drugs that could cure her breast cancer are so toxic to her body that even an innocuous infection could be fatal. As she flinches from the pain of taking a breath, I know that her raw, inflamed lung is scraping against the wall of her chest, making each gasp an ordeal.
I also know that somewhere at home, two little girls and their distraught father sit and wait in a house that rattles and gapes with the absence of their mummy.
“I need to be with them,” she rasps. “How soon?”
Although Ellen, as I’ll call her, gulps oxygen from the pipe on the wall, her pneumonia prevents her from talking in full sentences. I focus on getting her pain relief right, vital for enabling proper deep breathing, which allows me to suppress my private howl of disbelief.
Ellen, in her mid-thirties and with everything to live for, trusts her doctors to administer an antibiotic so potent that it is nicknamed Domestos; painkillers ten times more potent than opium; and chemotherapy literally designed to kill living human cells, a cytotoxic poison. Yet she will not, under any circumstances, countenance having a Covid vaccine. Her refusal makes me want to weep. The only thing worse than a young person’s death is one which easily could have been avoided. Thankfully, on this occasion Ellen’s chest infection is not Covid. But what about the next, and the one after that?
Does she not know how many unvaccinated young men and women with intact immune systems are suffocating to death in the intensive care unit one floor above her? How dumbfounded they were to discover that they were, after all, vulnerable to Covid? How they beg, sometimes, breaking all our hearts, to be vaccinated? How they plead for the protection they hope a jab might bring — when it is far too late for that now and all we can offer is a ventilator?
Ellen, I want to plead, how can you not choose life? For your children, for yourself, please be jabbed. You are so vulnerable I can hardly bear it. I say nothing, of course. Now is not the time. But I wonder for the thousandth time how we have arrived here, in this madness: a place where intelligent men and women would rather catch a deadly infectious disease than accept a vaccine with exceptional, and demonstrable, safety and effectiveness.
Now, in my NHS trust, we once again have entire wards devoted to treating Covid patients, in addition to those on mechanical ventilation in ICU. We are giving our all to care for our share of the 8,000 patients in UK hospitals with Covid. Out of sight, out of mind, these patients quietly continue to die at a rate of about 1,000 a week. The public can almost pretend they are not there. But we can’t.
Colleagues have seen children orphaned when first an unvaccinated mother and then an unvaccinated father succumb to Covid in swift succession. Pregnant, intubated women have died in intensive care shortly after their babies were delivered by emergency caesarean section.
Of the Covid patients treated in intensive care in recent months, the majority — nearly 75 per cent according to the latest data — have chosen not to be vaccinated. As Professor Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, put it this week: “This ongoing horror, which is taking place across ICUs in Britain, is now largely restricted to unvaccinated people.”
Individual decisions to forgo vaccination are having inevitable consequences for everyone else. In my NHS trust, we are on permanent black alert. We have already converted every conceivable spare space — discharge lounges, offices, oversized broom cupboards — into extra wards for patients. There is no spare capacity whatsoever.
The maths is brutal. One in, one out. Unless this patient leaves, that one cannot enter. The ambulance queue snakes around A&E, with paramedics sometimes spending an entire 12-hour shift stuck on the hospital forecourt, unable to drop off their patient. Trapped people are dying of heart attacks and strokes in the back of stationary ambulances, to the horror of all involved in trying to care for them.
In this desperate context, as patients suffer across the NHS, I can well understand the anger some clinicians feel towards the unvaccinated. I do not share it, however. The bedrock of good medicine is treating your patient simply as a human being in need. The moment you start making value judgments about what has brought them into hospital — smoking, paragliding, breaking the speed limit or riding a horse — you are not behaving as a doctor.
With our unvaccinated Covid patients, I feel more than anything desolate, heartbroken. I simply hate seeing them die. And I know they are here, in part, because a torrent of disinformation, spewed out on social media, has made them too scared to have the vaccine.
My rage is reserved for the charlatans who use their platforms to sow mistruths at such terrible cost. For the clever commentators who have latched on to the antivaxer movement to score political points by whipping up an ideological reaction to what they dub “vaccine dictatorship”.
These people are liars and cynics with blood on their hands.
Rachel Clarke is an NHS palliative care doctor
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