Over the last week, eighty-four-year-old gay actor George Takei, best known as Sulu from “Star Trek,” was trending on Twitter. That’s not so unusual. The social media platform has given him a higher profile with more than three million followers, many of whom presumably were not around in the days of Sulu and may have never connected with any of the “Star Trek” incarnations. (Takei also has ten million Facebook followers.) He’s known for tweeting sharp, sometimes humorous, takes on politics, clearly leaning left, as well as regularly recognizing LGBTQ accomplishments.
In 2019, after Donald Trump refused to denounce the Proud Boys during a presidential debate, Takei took to Twitter, proposing that the LGBTQ community take over #ProudBoys by using the hashtag and tweeting photos of men kissing. That would show what proud boys truly looked like. It worked.
This week’s attention comes from a tweet opining that people who choose not to be vaccinated and wind up in hospital should not get priority care over others seeking treatment for equally urgent conditions.
The willfully unvaccinated who wind up in hospitals from Covid should not receive priority medical care over other very sick or injured people who are as much in urgent need of medical care.
— George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) August 13, 2021
Provocative. It’s reflective of the palpable frustration regarding the rise in COVID cases yet again and the inability to stop the spread of variants in part because too many unvaccinated people continue to spread the coronavirus. The unvaccinated pose a continuing burden on the healthcare system and, while claiming their stand is, inter alia, an assertion of individual rights (it’s more complicated than that), causing the general public to face a regression in terms of their own freedoms (e.g., renewed travel restrictions; mask requirements reinstated) and affecting the livelihood of many service industry workers due to such measures as restaurant and bar closures.
Many responded to Takei’s comment with wholehearted agreement, almost 40,000 liking his tweet and 9,000 retweeting it. I first ran across the tweet on Saturday morning when someone identifying as gay embedded Takei’s tweet and responded by saying this was a hideous, draconian proposition, akin to arguments during the AIDS crisis that gays shouldn’t receive empathy or care since those that got AIDS brought it on themselves.[1]
Oh, dear. Good point. Medical care does not judge. A lifelong smoker who gets lung cancer gets every possible treatment deemed effective. She is not tsk-tsked and told to wait until a nonsmoker with lung cancer is seen. An AIDS patient teetering toward hospice care does not wait longer as another patient in an equally dire medical condition is attended to. An addict who overdoses is not left if an unconscious person from a car accident is rolled in on a gurney.
These are the kind of ethical hypotheticals presented in university classes or on a Friday night as a group of philosophically minded hipsters smoke weed. Yes, we’ve heard that hospitals are struggling in treating and finding beds on account of increased admissions since the pandemic began. We’ve read about patients set up in hallways and even tents. Still, there are medical practitioners with different specialties and hospital units for different afflictions. The predicament Takei’s comment pertains to most would presumably involve patients in intensive care. Again, doctors won’t pit vaccinated COVID patients against the unvaccinated or someone with cancer against the antivaxxer person with COVID. Yes, in crisis situations in hospitals, certain cases take priority, but presumably this is based on how acute a patient’s needs are. Let’s hope, at least, that a scenario in which two patients with absolutely equal needs arrive in an ER with only one attending physician is indeed a hypothetical. Otherwise, I suppose it’s first come, first served.
But as I was riding the elevator the next day, a flaw came to mind regarding the person who asserted that Takei’s suggestion was the equivalent to AIDS shaming. The smoker, the addict, the gay man who becomes ill requires care based on behavior alone. There is no vaccine for lung cancer, no vaccine for addictive disorders, no vaccine for AIDS. Presumably, if such vaccines existed, there would be similar frustration if a person particularly susceptible to an affliction didn’t take the vaccine and becomes ill. The initial behavior is not judged but the choice not to be vaccinated, a behavior or non-behavior itself, is what’s at issue. It’s a different level of culpability, heightening Joe Public’s frustration and likely contributing to a greater sense of regret from the patient himself.
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| No lie, I got light-headed just looking up photos of people getting vaccinated. |
There are vaccines for COVID. True, we have no long-term research on any potential harm from taking it. Like EVERY OTHER vaccine, it is not 100% effective. Also, like every other vaccine or medication, there are potential side effects, some very serious. Just listen to the fast-talking listing of side effects, including death, in every medication commercial. I am taking daily meds with frightening short-term and long-term dangers, but I talk with my doctors, strongly resisting over several conversations, and then I acquiesce, choosing to trust the expert and rely on the overwhelming odds I’ll be all right. I am my own a medical problem. I tune out talk about vitamins, I am reticent to take any medication and I am terrified of needles. (It’s documented as a clinical phobia in my rather thick psychiatric file.) Still, I take my meds. I got vaccinated. (Sorry, vitamin D pill. I’ll do without.) For both shots, I asked the poor staffers, “What’s it like stabbing people all day?” Yes, I see needles as incredibly invasive and threatening. To be clear though, I was profusely apologetic for my wimpy behavior and I repeatedly expressed gratitude for their work.
People who aren’t vaccinated are impacting those of us who are. It’s not just antivaxxers who’ve engaged in questionable behaviors during the pandemic. It might not have been wise for anyone to walk around in indoor public spaces without a mask or attend cousin Rita’s wedding along with seventy other people. But a very high percentage of now-vaccinated people making these choices remain unaffected. The initial behaviors may be the same, but medical science, but the risks are far different in terms of both incidence and degree.
Again, I think Takei’s tweet was a way of letting off steam and drawing attention to his social media platform. Many vaccinated people who are back to having to wear masks, putting off foreign travel and/or missing their shifts waiting tables for a low wage yelled, “Yeah!” and pressed the like button. I highly doubt his message made any unvaccinated person fret and rush out to get a shot. In fact, I suspect rhetoric like this causes antivaxxers to double down. No. Vaccine. Ever. Perhaps it’s a stance they’ll stick with till the day they die (hopefully due to old age, instead of this mutating coronavirus).
Like many, my frustration grows by the week, maybe even by the day. I also feel that getting closer to normality--some form of a freer “new normal”--is being impeded by the holdouts. How did we become so divided and stray so far from the initially universal notion of “We’re all in this together”?
[1] Sorry, I’ve searched for the tweet and can’t find it, but I’m pretty sure I’m accurately saying the gist of it. If not, I defer to dearly missed Gilda Radner’s Emily Litella.
2 comments:
There is a HUGE difference between stigmatizing an AIDS pandemic and that of people willingly not abiding by health guidelines such as mask-wearing and being vaccinated. If these men, women,and others had known they were prone to a sexually or fluid-spread disease, many of them would still be alive if there was a medication to help.
Anti-vaxxers will be adamant of their reasoning and its their right. However, when their willful ignorance and willful discrimination is jeopardizing a general population then we have something far worse than the pandemic themselves.
It is an endless battle to reason with these people that the government is not spying on them, it not a science-fiction aliens type of thing. It's basic human compassion and get yourself and others protected. But instead, they turn to QAnon, social media, the Sunday church sermons, or any snakeoil salesman for their information instead of scientists and the CDC.
Thanks for leaving a comment, Avalon808. I agree with what you say about so many antivaxxers. There have always been people against vaccinations. When I was a school principal, particularly in more rural communities, we had significant numbers of children whose parents refused consent for long-existing vaccines, well proven in their effectiveness. Alas, even then, darker corners of the internet fed people's distrust of vaccines. It amazed me how nurses and doctors whom the parents knew well could not dissuade them of their beliefs. Obviously things have gotten far worse with the coronavirus, the impacts more sweeping, the consequences more dire. Politics, of course, have also played a major role in so many people refusing to get vaccinated. Politicians and members of the clergy are in traditional positions of leadership and, at least with the clergy, of trust. I'm baffled and infuriated by the role they've played in this.
In the early years of the AIDS crisis, there was a fair amount of skepticism about a "gay disease" that was supposed to spread through sexual contact. Much of this was brought to light for me when I read And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts. People felt it was something made up, a ploy to force the baths to close and to scare people out of being gay; some thought the disease was developed by the government. There was distrust over early treatments, too. Of course, gays being an oppressed minority, made suspicions plausible. Sadly, there was neither the will nor the urgency to support medical research and, yes, we had some political leaders vilifying PWAs while other politicians ignored AIDS for too long.
There might also have been some suspicion early on regarding an AIDS vaccine. There would likely have been some who said the vaccine was only a placebo so gays would go on having unsafe sex and harming themselves or the "vaccine" was intended to harm, possibly kill, gays. Still, AIDS activism did wonders to speed up drug approvals, to allow access to clinical trials and to educate people about these drugs. I have no doubt that people would have been lining up to take an AIDS vaccine, myself included, had one been developed. But it's all just conjecture, isn't it?
I'm still waiting, as are all of us. (Promising news yesterday, with Moderna beginning trials on a potential vaccine, but testing will follow "normal" protocols, stretching into 2023.)
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