Rachel Maddow Emotionally Denounces Antivax ‘Personal Choice’ Arguments: ‘Tell That To the Family of the Person Who Just Died’
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow got emotional Wednesday night talking about hospitals in the areas of the country hardest hit by Covid, with non-Covid patients having trouble getting treatment and staff having to make decisions about rationing care.
Maddow reported that Gov. Mike Dunleavy (R-AK) had just announced that Alaska was declaring its hospitals to be shifting to “crisis standards of care.” She explained that this was a type of rationing of care, where people who were “less likely to survive get moved down the priority list” to get an ICU bed or certain types of treatment or therapies.
Maddow was blunt about what this meant for other patients:
[I]n an effort to save as many human lives as possible, these hospitals now have permission and guidance to prioritize giving treatment to people who are more likely to live.
And that is as bad as it sounds. It means that some people will not be admitted to the hospital, even though they need to be hospitalized. Other people who might previously have been given curative treatment, treatment to cure them and save them, instead will just be given comfort care to try to make things easier for them.
And it’s a sort of anodyne phrase, crisis standards of care. But it is a terrible thing, and it is a thing that we really haven’t confronted before as a country.
The reason this was happening, Maddow explained, was “the huge influx of very sick Covid patients, swamping and effectively breaking the hospital systems in these states so that they can no longer provide care along the ethical and sort of technical guidelines that they’ve always followed.”
Maddow described the decisions that a large hospital in Anchorage, Alaska had been forced to make, with one example being four patents who needed a specific type of dialysis treatment, but only two of them could be treated. One of the two patients who did not get the treatment died. The other one remains hospitalized and is getting palliative care.
The MSNBC host turned her discussion to the people who say getting vaccinated is “a personal decision” because “it only affects you.”
This situation with hospitals in multiple states having to move to crisis standards of care was “unprecedented,” said Maddow, and “people who would live with normal hospital standards are dying instead.”
“Your personal decision whether or not to get vaccinated, it has really tangible consequences for a whole lot of other people who aren’t you.”
She kept hearing this “mantra” about vaccination being a personal decision, Maddow continued, and especially in the conservative media. “They keep saying… that it’s a personal decision, that it only affects you, that it doesn’t affect people who aren’t vaccinated. Well, tell that to the family of the person who just died in Anchorage because thaw couldn’t get that form of dialysis they would otherwise be able to get because that hospital is overrun.”
Maddow concluded, “Your decision whether or not to get vaccinated can be a life-or-death determining factor for somebody else who did get vaccinated,” but now needs hospital treatment for a car accident or some other non-Covid illness, and cannot be helped because of unvaccinated Covid patients filling up hospitals.
“This is not complicated math, and it is not–yeah, it may be a personal decision, but it’s a decision that has consequences way beyond your personal corporeal self.”
Watch the video above, via MSNBC.
