How Should We Feel About the Deliberately Unvaccinated?

Since they’re prolonging the pandemic, it’s hard to be compassionate, but being gullible shouldn’t be a death sentence.

Dr. Brytney Cobia is a hospitalist at Grandview Medical Center in Birmingham, Alabama who wrote a viral post on Facebook about the uptick in COVID-19 cases she’s experiencing at work. She speaks with unapologetic candor about how it makes her feel.

To begin with, she feels differently now than she did in the late-fall of 2020 when her hospital hit its peak in COVID-19 patients and deaths.  Back then she was seeing a lot of patients who had listened to experts and taken reasonable precautions. She felt awful for them.

“Back in 2020 and early 2021, when the vaccine wasn’t available, it was just tragedy after tragedy after tragedy,” Cobia told AL.com this week. “You know, so many people that did all the right things, and yet still came in, and were critically ill and died.”

In fact, she and her husband are both doctors and despite following all the protocols, one of them infected the other. As a precaution, she delivered her baby at 27 weeks of pregnancy. She definitely understands that following expert guidance alone is no guarantee that you won’t get infected.

But she’s struggling with the patients she’s seeing today. They had every chance to get vaccinated and for some reason they refused. “You kind of go into it thinking, ‘Okay, I’m not going to feel bad for this person, because they make their own choice,’” Cobia said.

As a hospitalist, she has the opportunity to interview her patients and she asks them for their reasoning.

“I try to be very non-judgmental when I’m getting a new COVID patient that’s unvaccinated, but I really just started asking them, ‘Why haven’t you gotten the vaccine?’ And I’ll just ask it point blank, in the least judgmental way possible,” she said. “And most of them, they’re very honest, they give me answers. ‘I talked to this person, I saw this thing on Facebook, I got this email, I saw this on the news,’ you know, these are all the reasons that I didn’t get vaccinated.

Of course, now that they’re suffocating, they want the vaccine but she has to tell them that it’s too late.

“They cry. And they tell me they didn’t know. They thought it was a hoax. They thought it was political. They thought because they had a certain blood type or a certain skin color they wouldn’t get as sick. They thought it was ‘just the flu’. But they were wrong. And they wish they could go back. But they can’t.”

In the end, she takes a more compassionate line with her patients despite her frustration with their choices.

“You kind of go into it thinking, ‘Okay, I’m not going to feel bad for this person, because they make their own choice,’” Cobia said. “But then you actually see them, you see them face to face, and it really changes your whole perspective, because they’re still just a person that thinks that they made the best decision that they could with the information that they have, and all the misinformation that’s out there.

“And now all you really see is their fear and their regret. And even though I may walk into the room thinking, ‘Okay, this is your fault, you did this to yourself,’ when I leave the room, I just see a person that’s really suffering, and that is so regretful for the choice that they made.”

I think this is a vitally important point. People are fallible. Some aren’t very smart. Some look for guidance from people who are misinformed. People trust folks who they shouldn’t trust. Most of us aren’t scientists and it’s hard to understand how viruses infect the body and how vaccines work. I know in my own life that I’ve had plenty of opportunity to say, “I should have listened to you.”

These aren’t reasons some should live or die. The real sin is preying on peoples’ fallibilities. Intentionally giving people bad information that gets them horribly sick or costs them their life is morally contemptible even when it isn’t technically illegal. Hiding behind free speech doesn’t cut it as an excuse.

We’re now in the phase of the pandemic where the overwhelming majority of fatalities in this country are with people who should have listened to expert advice but did not. They also trend heavily to the right, since it’s the right that has treated the pandemic as a political question first rather than a health crisis.

You can see how this works in the case of Randal Thom, a 60-year-old Marine who died in a car crash after attending a MAGA rally. He was a member of the First Row Joes, the Trump version of Deadheads who travel across the country to attend as many Trump rallies as possible. He narrowly survived his bout with COVID-19 but he made matters worse by refusing to see a doctor. His reasoning explains a lot. He didn’t want to get diagnosed and “potentially increase the caseload on Trump’s watch.”

That’s what happens when COVID-19 is treated as a political vulnerability for a Republican president. Somehow looking out for your own survival is seen as a way of helping Joe Biden. You can’t get tested. You can’t go to the doctor. You can’t get inoculated. You can’t socially distance or wear a mask. It’s all reinforced by people who share your political goals, so you trust them.

Of course, it’s also irrational, so you need strange theories to explain what the experts are saying and why it’s politically motivated or sinister in some way. Vaccinations are a plot to create a one world government or take away our freedoms or control our thoughts. COVID-19 is a deadly Chinese bioweapon but still somehow a grossly exaggerated danger. A whole cottage industry springs up to sustain the initial insanity of the decision to treat COVID-19 as a campaign issue that helps the Democrats.

It only helped the Democrats because Trump wouldn’t acknowledge or act on the threat and more than a half a million Americans died, many unnecessarily. This has now morphed into a situation where natural selection is acting on Republicans, solely because of the collective dreamworld they erected in their desperate attempt to excuse and explain Trump’s performance in office. Many of the victims are past reproductive age, so natural selection is often more political in nature. Republican votes are being lost.

You’d think that they’d realize at this point that their game has backfired. They’re falling behind politically not because of a biased media or liberal schools or voter fraud, but because they’re dying at a much higher rate than Democrats. But it’s too late now. They no longer live in a world that’s tethered to reality and they’re drifting hopelessly off into space.

It’s prolonging the pandemic and leading to more transmittable and deadly variants of the coronavirus, so it’s extremely difficult to be tolerant and compassionate. But it’s still more a tragedy than a political question. I can’t say anyone deserves to die except those who seek profit and power from leading these folks astray.

Author: BooMan

Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.

20 thoughts on “How Should We Feel About the Deliberately Unvaccinated?”

  1. You’re a better man than me. At this point, I have zero compassion for the unvaxxed. It’s straight-up willful ignorance, and unbelievably, irredeemably selfish.

  2. My eldest sister-in-law and her husband died in India after having only got the first dose of AstraZeneca vaccine, in late April and early May of this year.
    My 95 year old father died on July 5, 2020 – when he had no chance!

    My extended family and high school and college class mates, who are in India – have searched high and low for being able to get the vaccines. Many have got the Indian Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin, which probably is very low efficacy, and has not been properly vetted. And this is only the tiny fraction of the urban population in Tier 1 metropolises. In Tier 2 cities, things are often quite desperate in terms of vaccine availability.

    So I have ZERO compassion for people here who have refused to get vaccinated! Misguided you say? Do they use cell phones, cars, airplanes? NO, they are not misguided.
    We need this fraction of the herd to be culled in order for the rest of us to live a decent life.
    Please go to your Maker asap!

      1. That’s good to know. But India approved its use well before the studies were published. And Modi had this false premise of “Made in India” – AZ/Covishield is manufactured by Serum Institute in Pune. Also extremely stupid HCQ diplomacy by Modi – so there’s plenty of blood on his hands.

        1. Believe me, I am in complete agreement with respect to Modi’s culpability. The death rate is probably 10x the official number (over 4 million!), putting India well ahead of even Brazil in terms of deaths.

          It’s especially galling and repulsive when his supporters are still (STILL!) insist that the media is just out to get him, it’s not his fault, and how dare you speak ill of him. I spit on him and his cult.

    1. My condolences to you for those you have lost. That’s probably cold comfort, at best. I haven’t lost anyone close to me from COVID-19 or its variants – yet – but I have some close friends who did become infected, and at least one is a long-hauler at this point. A close friend of mine died of a heart attack in January this year, before vaccines were made widely available. As far as I know a memorial service for my friend was never held here. I don’t know if my friend had been experiencing symptoms of an impending heart attack – she tended to keep a lot to herself as far as her own health issues went – but given how much overflow there was in our local hospital system around that time, I doubt she’d have been treated if she had simply tried to contact urgent care. I have elderly parents who could be shut out of needed care because hospitals in our set of states are running out of beds, and staff. If anyone close to me dies or is permanently disabled in some way from this virus due to a large subset of covidiots in my state and region exercising their privilege to refuse not only the vaccine but any other reasonable public safety precaution? As far as I’m concerned they can all go to hell.

  3. Rhetorical question? I am simply furious and out of fucks to give. I’m ready for society to be punitive and keep these people out of public spaces.

  4. I haven’t seen my kid in a year and a half because of these morons—who, by the way, have spent decades calling people like us all sorts of unflattering things like “libtard,” “commie,” “n*gger lover,” and “America hater,” and meaning it.

    Between not seeing my kid, isolating for so long, and watching these maniacs crawl out from under their rocks thanks to Trump, I’ve got some degree of PTSD, and have to get therapy (and probably medication) to deal with chronic depression I didn’t have before.

    So I can honestly say I hate them, I will never forgive them, and I actively and openly enjoy reading about their suffering and deaths. I don’t think anyone should feel like I do—I speak for myself only—but that’s how I feel.

    1. You’re not alone. I pretty much feel the same way. I’m not proud of it. None of us have physically seen any of our relatives in between a year and a half and two years. We made a judgment to not travel to the west coast this year – we just couldn’t afford it. There is still hope to get those within a few hours drive together – those of us who can fully vaccinate have, which at this point is everyone. My parents are getting very elderly. Most of us have some pre-existing condition, and with each passing day we lose yet another chance to connect. So yeah. I’m mad as hell at the idiots who’ve done everything in their power to make things worse, and if they become casualties of the pandemic? Good riddance. It’s not a great attitude to hold, and yeah, I’m not proud of it. This whole last year and a half in particular has done a number on me psychologically as well.

      1. Yes to all of that. I feel those idiots deserve what they get like the story of the guy about to be intubated who asks for the vaccine, freaking idiot. But then I feel that those feelings are not right either. Still these are the fools who raided the capitol and wanted to reinstall Trump and STILL DO.

  5. We’re starting to see Republicans coming out in favor of vaccines. Even on Fox News. A segment of the GOP recognizes it’s in a can’t win argument with reality and wants to retreat. Problem is there’s another segment that’s still reenacting Pickett’s Charge. This may be the first major fissure on the right. I’m hoping it opens wider and wider until it swallows the entire edifice of the GOP whole. Then something good will have come out of the carnage.

  6. Well I went back to April 3rd for this exchange on another website.

    “XXXXX • 4 months ago
    If vaccines work, why are pro vax folks afraid of the unvaccinated? Just leave them alone to die. Why all the angst toward people who dissent? Don’t I have the right to disagree? Etc…Anti vaxers are being dehumanized and demonized!

    Thanks for the replies. I needed to vent. This is so frustrating….

    Racer X • 4 months ago
    The greater the number of unvaccinated people in a community, the more opportunity germs have to spread. With COVID, the unvaccinated become potential incubators for variants/mutations. If the virus morphs into a variant that present vaccinations cannot stop we’re all screwed and we start all over again. The anti-vaxers are putting us all at risk.”

    It appears that having their voters die has suddenly dawned on the GQP as being a bad tactic. If the anti-vaxers change course then I say “better late than never”. If you are taking action to save more Americans other than yourself then you get a pass from me.

    If they still want stay unvaccinated – I’ll stand my ground.

  7. While remodeling a kitchen, I learned that two of the workers had refused to get the vaccine because it is all a hoax (to them). They live, work, own homes, pay taxes, drive their motorcycles, drink beer, are in their 60’s, have older children and grandchildren and hate Democrats with a passion. (BTW, did you know that the 1/6 Insurrection is all a hoax and that Three Percenters are just good old boys having a good time, camping in the woods and shooting anything that moves? Me neither.) In my mind, they are smart enough to know better, but they have made their minds up.

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