I had lunch the other day with a very old and very dear friend from the United States who was able to exploit the one-sided, one-nationality ‘air bridge’ between his country and ours and visit the United Kingdom. I knew we would not agree on everything COVID related. With us it has been a matter of principle to disagree; we started as undergraduate classmates and see no reason to stop now. We have had the occasional email spat about my writings on the pandemic in outlets such as Unity News Network, so I expected a good fight over our pints of Black Sheep Ale. I was unprepared for how far along the road of COVID orthodoxy my friend had gone, up to and including offering a mask to an unmasked young lady on the train and enquiring after her vaccination status. I told him that he’d have had a very robust and impolite response from me, had I been her. This earned me a kick in the shins under the table from my wife, a long-suffering referee to our frequent squabbles, and a look of astonishment from my friend.
“But” he asked me, “how do you think an ICU doctor feels if they are having to treat an unvaccinated person with COVID when they could be treating someone else?” I didn’t respond at the time as I thought expensive and hard-earned beer might start to fly and we decided, with my wife’s help, to move on to talking about our respective families. But I do have a response for my friend and for others in the mainstream and social media from whom I have heard this point and even arguments that the unvaccinated should not be treated in the NHS. Obesity apparently triples your chances of being hospitalised with COVID, is anyone suggesting we should simply leave them to die? This all takes me back to my service as a military nurse in the First Gulf War and forward to my daughter’s service as a military nurse in Afghanistan.
In the First Gulf War we were issued with a breast pocket summary of the relevant sections of the Geneva Conventions on War and with a similarly sized card showing Iraqi military ranks and how to recognise them. Our instructions were to treat based on medical priority regardless of side or rank and to treat senior Iraqi ranked military with due respect to their seniority. So effective were we in the First Gulf War at sucking the lungs out of the frontline Republican Guard, inverting and disintegrating their bodies in firestorms before burying them as we bulldozed their defences that we saw no enemy casualties in my hospital. But my daughter had a very different experience in Afghanistan. She treated many wounded Taliban, again, based on strict medical priority with neither fear nor favour. She was fully aware that the chap in the bed may have been caught in the act of setting IEDs near her base or have killed one of her comrades in a shootout and may well be preventing an ISAF soldier from being treated. But those were the orders and, moreover, that was the mindset.
But anti-vaccine adherents are not even our enemy. They are not out to kill us. They hold strong and genuinely held concerns about vaccines generally to which, incidentally, I do not adhere. On the other hand, others hold legitimate and specific concerns about the COVID vaccines which remain experimental, controversial and—for some—demonstrably dangerous, with which I do agree. I have expressed doubts, in any case, about how effective the vaccines are and if the risk for individuals is worthwhile.
If we can show compassion towards a wounded Taliban soldier, surely doctors and nurses can show the same to the unvaccinated amongst us who succumb to COVID. If not, then, what is the alternative? We have gone far enough down the road to becoming a totalitarian state with the health fascists at the helm. It must stop.
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