American health care workers have earned our respect, and our help as they care for us

Sunday, Jan. 9, 2022 | 2 a.m.

America’s health care workers stand high on the list of heroes of the coronavirus pandemic, but you wouldn’t know it by how many of them are being treated amid the wildfire-like spread of the omicron variant.

Across the country, hospitals are filling up with unvaccinated patients who, fueled by right-wing misinformation, are hostile to science and are defying the very medical professionals who are doing their best to keep them alive and well. Instead of following sound medical advice, these gullible and delusional patients are demanding quack treatments like ivermectin. Some are even suing hospitals that justifiably refuse to give them unproven treatments.

“They insult your intelligence, they insult your ability, and most hurtful, they say that by not using these therapies, you are intentionally trying to harm the people we’ve given everything to save,” one Minnesota physician told CNN.

Think of how that would make you feel if you were a health care worker. Here you are, exhausted and stressed after nearly two years of dealing with the pandemic and watching untold numbers of people die. For months you’ve grown increasingly desperate, wondering when the public would finally do its part to mitigate this long nightmare.

Now here comes another wave of unvaccinated Americans, screaming at you and your dedicated colleagues who want nothing more than to care for them and cure their illness. Your work environment has grown hostile: Because hospitals are filled with the unvaccinated deluded by far-right propaganda, health care workers are immersed in the highest concentration of right-wing extremist anger that can be found.

Imagine being stuck working the wards filled with whack jobs who “did their own research” — code for googling conspiracy theories — and are now foaming at the mouth in fury as they demand a bleach injection or some such Trumpian idiocy. Quick,someone call the pillow guy or the kraken or Rudy or the Demon Lady doctor or, God help you, Q for a second opinion. Roll up the clown car to the emergency room and hand them stethoscopes! Someone call JFK Jr., stat, he’ll know what to do!

All the medical training in the world isn’t worth a damn in the fever dream that is MAGA’s alternative reality. What a nightmare our doctors and nurses and aides are facing.

And there is nothing health care workers can say to prompt these individuals to disavow the misinformation that is killing them as sure as the virus that has invaded their bodies — they’re determined to stick steadfast to Fox News lies, social media voodoo science and far-right political dogma until their dying breath.

How long before medical professionals throw up their hands and walk away?

This is no way to treat the nation’s health care providers, who have done so much for so many. But it also represents a danger to everyone, in that it threatens to drive hospital staffers away from their jobs and further weaken a system that has already been pushed to the brink by the pandemic.

For every admission of an unvaccinated individual, a hospital loses capacity to care for people who have breakthrough cases or other medical needs — those suffering chronic illnesses, traumatic injuries and so forth. And every time a beleaguered health care worker finally calls it quits, or suffers a breakthrough case of COVID-19 due to proximity to infected individuals, that capacity also suffers.

Yet because of the public vaccine hesitancy that is sustaining the pandemic, health care workers are leaving the profession in alarming numbers. One poll from last fall showed that nearly 20% of the workforce had quit since February 2020, with the majority of those individuals citing burnout related to the pandemic.

It’s become a vicious cycle — health care workers want desperately to do their jobs and save lives, but staffing shortages are undercutting their ability to provide care and are leaving them frustrated, overworked and emotionally spent.

Who could blame those who leave the profession? There’s only so much culturally assisted suicide anyone can be expected to witness.

The situation calls for Americans to give a resounding show of support to our health care workers. We can do this in many ways: getting vaccinations and boosters, wearing high-quality masks and following pandemic safety guidelines, volunteering to make food runs for hospital workers, maybe even returning to the early days of the pandemic when people went outside and banged pots and pans to celebrate first responders and health care providers.

But for people who find themselves having to enter the health care system, one critical way of supporting medical professionals is simply to follow their advice. They know what they’re doing, so let them do it without being exposed to malice.

Meanwhile, to the unvaccinated Americans who allowed themselves to go unguarded from the omicron outbreak and are heading to hospitals, we’ll say this: Misinformation and your own MAGA gullibility got you into deadly trouble, so it’s time to be quiet about horse dewormers and such quackery, and let the medical professionals you have ignored — and burdened — go about saving your life using their proven skills and science.

“Folks act as if they can come in the hospital and request any certain therapy they want or conversely decline any therapy they want, with the idea being that somehow they can pick and choose and direct their therapy. And it doesn’t work,” the Minnesota doctor told CNN.

No, it doesn’t work — not for health care workers, not for those who need to access the health care system due to accidents or serious illnesses other than COVID-19, and definitely not for the unvaccinated individuals who are taking their misguided belief in fake cures to their graves.