No vaccination? Then no medical care.
And can you blame medical professionals for drawing a line in the sand?
An Alabama doctor announced in August that come October, he would no longer treat unvaccinated patients. Dr. Jason Valentine let unvaccinated patients know that his office would cheerfully transfer their records, because:
“I told them COVID is a miserable way to die and I can't watch them die like that.”
This was roughly around the same time Dr. Valentine’s state ran out of ICU beds because of an abundance of COVID cases. Medical experts say Dr. Valentine was within his legal rights, though ethically, well…
But what medical professional hasn’t reached compassion fatigue during this awful pandemic? I’m not a medical professional, and I arrived at compassion fatigue roughly 11 months ago. I wish vaccines were mandated for absolutely everyone, no exceptions given, and no quarter taken. I don’t know how doctors, nurses, and others keep treating people for whom science and the killer virus aren’t real. My hat is off to them.
This is all on Donald Trump and his cult for politicizing the virus and then politicizing the vaccine. But it's also on the suckers and losers who fell for the grift. In my lifetime I have seen smallpox, polio, measles, mumps, chickenpox, tetanus, and diphtheria wiped out with vaccines. That's just in this country. When I went to Africa in 1980, I had to be vaccinated for cholera, typhoid, and yellow fever, and in addition I had to have another smallpox vaccination, which didn't "take" because I was still immunized from the childhood vaccination.
I've related the story of the polio vaccine rollout in Dallas in 1962. Over 90% of the population of nearly a million people took the oral vaccine over the course of a couple of weekends in July and August. Swimming pools reopened. (Water was thought to be one mode of transmission, but we didn't really know.) Parents no longer feared their child would be next.
How did we sink so low?
Here is what the AMA says about the ethics of it. You have to read the whole thing for the full answer. It's complicated and it depends.
I don't know this physician's situation, but he could be missing out on having conversations with people who are unvaccinated. Private conversations with trusted medical providers could change minds.