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Comment by TheFreim | Hacker News Reader

> Healthcare staff have great animosity towards the unvaccinated patients. They aren't victims here, they did this to themselves.

That seems strange to me considering there are TONS of diseases that are completely the victims fault. Diabetes, heart diseases, lung issues, etc can all be caused because someone chose to make unfortunate decisions. Why would you get into a profession where you're in contact with this kind of person in a daily basis and then get upset that you come into contact with them?

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1) No one with diabetes yells at you that “diabetes is a hoax” and tells you to fuck off as you intubate them. 2) the prevention/cure for diabetes is clear (weight loss) but extremely difficult (low success rates). The prevention for covid is extremely easy and requires almost zero sacrifice or change in habits.

Me and my colleagues have not heard a single patient beg for the vaccine, tell us to fuck off as we intubate them (if they're able to do that, they have to consent to it), and I haven't heard any of my staff do anything that suggests animosity toward unvaccinated patients. There is plenty of animosity toward the families of elderly, bedbound, nonverbal patients that demand they be hospitalized every time they "seem more confused than usual." The vast majority of nurses here are unvaccinated, but most had COVID-19 last year prior to the vaccine if the rumors I hear from them are true.

May I practice medicine in some outlier area, but all the headlines I've seen just seem to dramatize things. The one about the doctor who claimed she would tell patients "it's too late" then intubate them soundly particularly like bullshit.

True, but Covid has the additional trait of being transmissible. It's reasonably likely that anyone sick enough to need hospitalization passed the infection on to someone else at some point. And it takes just a few minutes to almost completely eliminate the possibility of hospitalization for Covid, but obesity (for example) could take years.

Some people get T2 diabetes without being overweight, some lung cancer patients have never smoked. It's not "completely the victims fault".

If I could take two shots that prevented me from having Heart Disease and never having a heart attack that kills me, I would get those two shots.

One has a simple, free, and pretty readily available solution to prevent death. The others are not that black and white.

Eating healthy isn't difficult in a country like the United States and eating healthy prevents many medical issues. It seems pretty black and white from my point of view (I do understand that some issues are generic, those aren't what I'm discussing here).

Healthy food is expensive and time consuming to make, many Americans can't afford it and also don't easily have access to it.

Heard this many times but without detail. What exactly is expensive and time-consuming? Chicken/Beef, beans, pasta, rice, some greens, salt, pepper. Cooking simple dishes and putting them to a freezer can be done on weekend. What exactly is expensive and time consuming in US?

Because those conditions are more complex; there is some choice, but it's not the full picture. Those conditions don't overflow the hospitals either. In the United States, any adult could get the vaccine for free for months now, and these patients chose not to. I fully understand why a healthcare worker would be struggling with empathy at a time like this.

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