Caring for the Unvaccinated

“Why take care of sick, unvaccinated people with COVID? They chose not to take advantage of a free, safe, life-preserving vaccine. They did this to themselves. Why not just send them home, and let nature take its course?”

These are questions I’ve been seeing a lot on social media. Interestingly, I have rarely seen it from those of us involved in health care. Let me explain why we do it.

First of all, if you’re asking this question, I hear what you’re saying, and I get it. As a doctor myself, vaccine refusal has always been frustrating, maddening, even infuriating, and never more so than now.

However, if we were to refuse treatment to unvaccinated people who end up sick with COVID, can we then refuse to treat a person with lung cancer who smokes? An obese person who has coronary artery disease? A person with syphilis who had sex without a condom? A diabetic who goes into ketoacidosis because they ate some ice cream? I wish medicine could just be about prevention. It would make my life a lot easier.

And frankly, that’s what Public Health is for. To prevent illness. While a lot of what we do in Medicine overlaps with Public Health, we Health Care Providers also have to take care of people who are sick and often are sick because of terrible choices they made. Sometimes that truly sucks, but as a fallible human being myself who has probably made some decisions that have impacted my body and my health and that were not necessarily consonant with good health practices, I can’t deny care to someone because they’re imperfect or because they’re ungrateful or even because they’re antagonistic. It’s the job we do, and sometimes these people, after they have been through their ordeal, will say, “Thank you. I wish I had made a different choice.”

Still, that’s not why we do it. We do it because that’s what we do.