Tag: healthcare

Leftists: Health Care Is A Human Right, Unless You’re Unvaccinated

The same people who spent the last decade telling you health care is a human right now want to be able to deny it to you.

As if it wasn’t enough to hound people without the COVID-19 shot out of their jobs, schools, and even effectively whole cities, pundits and even some doctors are now floating the idea of denying medical care to people based on COVID-19 vaccination status.

“Is it time to put those who are endangering public health by refusing vaccines on notice that if they need care they will go to the end of the line, behind the patients who acted responsibly?” asks the Washington Post in a totally-not-loaded-at-all question.

While the Post article doesn’t endorse refusing treatment to the unvaccinated as punishment per se, it leaves the door wide open for denial of health care in certain instances. “Patients should expect to be told that being tested and wearing a mask are conditions of receiving care,” it notes. “For non-urgent care in which sufficient advance notice is given, requiring vaccination as a condition of continued service might also be defensible.”

The author makes no secret of his bias either, proudly admitting, “It’s easy to feel anger — as I do — toward those who perversely promote unwarranted skepticism about the seriousness of coronavirus infection, as well as the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.”

“Taking vaccination status into account when deciding whether to treat a patient can be acceptable — sometimes,” waxes an NBC thinkpiece.

Alabama doctor Jason Valentine posted a photo of himself next to a sign bragging he would “no longer see patients that are not vaccinated against COVID-19.” To patients questioning the motive for his decision, Valentine says “I told them COVID is a miserable way to die and I can’t watch them die like that.”

Dr. Linda Marraccini of Miami took similar steps, informing her thousands of patients their patronage would be terminated if they failed to vaccinate against COVID-19 and blaming them for a “lack of selflessness.” Becker’s Hospital Review published her story under the conspicuous headline “One physician’s case for refusing to treat unvaccinated patients in person.”

An internal memo circulated to a group of Texas doctors acknowledged, “Many are understandably angry and frustrated with the unvaccinated” and instructed “Vaccine status … may be considered when making triage decisions as part of the physician’s assessment of each individual’s likelihood of survival.” After the news leaked, one of the doctors involved backtracked his story and insisted the memo was a “homework assignment.”

These commentators and physicians know they can’t (yet) make blanket assertions that those who haven’t received the COVID-19 shot should be flatly turned away from critical care, but they are nonetheless stealthily planting the conversation in the public mind.

Meanwhile, people like Jimmy Kimmel are getting away with it, as the late-night host mocked the unvaccinated and suggested they should be denied lifesaving treatment. “Vaccinated person having a heart attack? Yes, come right in, we’ll take care of you. Unvaccinated guy who gobbled horse goo? Rest in peace, wheezy,” Kimmel needled, taking a dig at Ivermectin, a Nobel Prize-winning drug which has been misleadingly mocked as a horse dewormer, despite the fact that it has been used as an antiparasitic for human patients for decades.

Others are “merely” suggesting the unvaccinated should pay more for their healthcare. “Americans have just about had it up to here with people who refuse COVID-19 vaccinations,” begins a Los Angeles Times column from Michael Hiltzik entitled “Should the unvaccinated pay more for healthcare? That’s an easy call.”

“Unvaccinated people could be held civilly or even criminally liable if it can be shown that their behavior brought harm to others” — i.e., infected them — reads one of Hiltzik’s suggestions. As an example, he cites the possibility of nursing home employees who aren’t vaccinated (but curiously doesn’t mention the policies of Democrat governors like New York’s Andrew Cuomo, who condemned thousands of residents to their deaths by forcing nursing homes to take infected COVID-19 patients).

In another suggestion, he cites economist Jonathan Meer’s take in MarketWatch: “Insurers, led by government programs, should declare that medically-able, eligible people who choose not to be vaccinated are responsible for the full financial cost of COVID-related hospitalizations.”

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Hospital removed sick patients from transplant wait list after they refused to get the COVID vaccine: Report

A hospital in Washington state has reportedly removed multiple sick patients from its transplant wait list over their decision not to receive a coronavirus vaccine.

Conservative Seattle radio host Jason Rantz reported Tuesday that the University of Washington Medical Center has kicked “several patients” off its organ transplant list in recent months, citing an unofficial policy requiring transplant recipients to be vaccinated against the pathogen.

One of the patients, Derek Kovick, a 41-year-old man in need of a liver transplant, informed Rantz of the controversial hospital policy last week. Then shortly after, another patient, 64-year-old Sam Allen, came forward with his own story.

Allen, who suffers from a litany of heart-related medical conditions, told the radio host he had been on the hospital’s wait list for a heart transplant for more than two years. But in June, after doctors discovered that he was unvaccinated and had no plans to change that, he was informed that he would no longer be in line for the transplant.

He said it all started following a disagreement over mask-wearing at the hospital.

“The cardiologist called me, and we had a discussion, and he informed me that, ‘Well, you’re going to have to get a vaccination to get a transplant.’ And I said, ‘Well that’s news to me and nobody’s ever told me that before.’ And he says, ‘Yeah, that’s our policy,'” Allen recalled.

After he refused, the hospital sent him a letter in June informing him that he had been pulled from the United Network for Organ Sharing wait list for a heart.

“Your name has been removed from the waitlist at the University of Washington Medical Center,” the letter read. “This was done in follow-up to your recent conversation with providers regarding the heart transplant selection committee’s concerns about compliance with COVID-19-related policies and recommendations.”

The letter added that Allen’s situation could potentially be reassessed but only if he satisfied their “compliance concerns.”

According to Rantz, when he reached out to the UW Medical Center for an explanation, the hospital did not deny the allegations. Officials did, however, reject the notion that an official policy is on the books. But Rantz isn’t buying it.

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Healthcare professionals app Doximity promises crackdown after doctors are accused of sharing “misinformation”

Doctors who take to social media to discuss their opposition to various COVID measures are facing calls for censorship from media outlets.

CNBC says it discovered plenty of vaccine skeptic statements on Doximity, a doctor-to-doctor networking site. While the reports shared on the app are from well-known news organizations and scientific journals, the comments, CNBC says, appear to be full of “misinformation” about vaccination safety, mask use, and natural immunity, among other things.

Dr Paul Malarik, a retired psychiatrist, spends up to 50 hours a month in pop-up clinics near his home in San Luis Obispo, California, helping to deliver COVID-19 vaccines. According to him, when he logs onto Doximity and sees vaccine skeptic remarks, he’s particularly disturbed.

Doximity is only open to healthcare professionals in the United States, and members must be verified before they can join. No one may post anonymously on the site.

It has long been branded as “LinkedIn for doctors,” had its stock market debut in June and quickly rose to a market valuation of $10 billion. According to the company’s IPO prospectus, it has 1.8 million members, including 80% of doctors. They utilize the site to remain in touch with one another, discuss research, keep up with industry news, and securely interact with patients.

Doximity likewise doesn’t let users publish their articles or stories; instead, it curates content from medical and scientific journals as well as mainstream news. Each user receives a personalized feed of aggregated material depending on their choices, such as their field of medical practice.

Members of Doximity may comment on articles, which is where the alleged “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories” appear to thrive, according to CNBC.

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Biracial Harvard-educated doctor claims hospital DEMOTED her for opposing plans to have only black staff treat black patients in wake of George Floyd murder

A Harvard-educated, biracial physician was removed as head of the OB/GYN department of a Minneapolis hospital after she opposed offering patients ‘segregated care based on race’, she claims. 

Dr. Tara Gustilo filed a discrimination complaint against Hennepin Healthcare System in June saying she was demoted for criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement on her social media page.

The complaint says that she was removed from her position despite rave job performance reviews during her six-year stint as head of a 32-person team.

‘Under my leadership, my department improved my patient satisfaction scores and connected our hospital’s diverse population with the care that they needed,’ Gustilo says in the complaint.

She received ‘one of the highest patient satisfaction ratings of all the doctors at Hennepin Healthcare and in the nation.’

But in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year, Gustilo criticized ‘anti-racist’ training, claiming that it was ‘actually teaching racism.’

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Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

Health research is based on trust. Health professionals and journal editors reading the results of a clinical trial assume that the trial happened and that the results were honestly reported. But about 20% of the time, said Ben Mol, professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at Monash Health, they would be wrong. As I’ve been concerned about research fraud for 40 years, I wasn’t that surprised as many would be by this figure, but it led me to think that the time may have come to stop assuming that research actually happened and is honestly reported, and assume that the research is fraudulent until there is some evidence to support it having happened and been honestly reported. The Cochrane Collaboration, which purveys “trusted information,” has now taken a step in that direction.

As he described in a webinar last week, Ian Roberts, professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, began to have doubts about the honest reporting of trials after a colleague asked if he knew that his systematic review showing the mannitol halved death from head injury was based on trials that had never happened. He didn’t, but he set about investigating the trials and confirmed that they hadn’t ever happened. They all had a lead author who purported to come from an institution that didn’t exist and who killed himself a few years later. The trials were all published in prestigious neurosurgery journals and had multiple co-authors. None of the co-authors had contributed patients to the trials, and some didn’t know that they were co-authors until after the trials were published. When Roberts contacted one of the journals the editor responded that “I wouldn’t trust the data.” Why, Roberts wondered, did he publish the trial? None of the trials have been retracted.

Later Roberts, who headed one of the Cochrane groups, did a systematic review of colloids versus crystalloids only to discover again that many of the trials that were included in the review could not be trusted. He is now sceptical about all systematic reviews, particularly those that are mostly reviews of multiple small trials. He compared the original idea of systematic reviews as searching for diamonds, knowledge that was available if brought together in systematic reviews; now he thinks of systematic reviewing as searching through rubbish. He proposed that small, single centre trials should be discarded, not combined in systematic reviews.

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