It’s easy to judge the unvaccinated. As a doctor, I see a better alternative
The anger I feel toward vaccine-hesitant people becomes a more complicated emotion when I witness them reckoning with their choices. Many of the unvaccinated people I’ve talked with are hard-working, loving individuals struggling to catch a break in a life that hasn’t been fair. They’re unmoored and don’t know what to believe when truth itself has supply-chain problems and the health care system has been letting them down for years.
Belonging to a moral profession implies the possibility of moral distress and even moral injury, described as the emotional strain that results when the right thing to be done in a situation conflicts with what the situation permits, producing “mental, emotional, and spiritual distress.” Moral injury was a hot-button topic for clinicians long before the pandemic upended our lives and raised the ante for all of us.
Covid-19 rehitched many of us to this forgotten moral force. “This is why I went into medicine” was a frequent refrain from fellow nurses and physicians during the pandemic’s first wave, even as we donned suboptimal personal protective equipment. The moral distress that had weighed on many of us before the pandemic was balanced by worry and fear as well as a reminder of what it means to be part of a moral profession.
This time around, the unanticipated crisis driving the surge of cases was avoidable if enough people had taken the necessary precautions and got their Covid vaccines. This time around, my moral tank is leaking. The same thing is happening with many of my colleagues.
This frustration is echoed on Twitter, where vaccine exhortations are often punctuated with caps, exclamation marks, and emojis. At times, however, Twitter functions as a bottomless salad bar of group certainty and ego affirmation. I respect that frustration and I feel it, too. But I don’t believe that loud punctuation changes minds or creates conditions for shared understanding.
What we need is a harm-reduction strategy. If shortages of personal protective equipment exemplified a fatal shortcoming at the start of the pandemic, I feel that we’re now dangerously low on meaningful dialogue. [Continue reading…]