Vaccine Refusers Risk ‘Compassion Fatigue’

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After the horrors that health-care workers have endured during the pandemic, many are struggling to sympathize with people who won’t protect themselves.

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On social media, I’ve been seeing sentiments that I never thought I’d see anyone express in a public forum. People who choose to be unvaccinated should not be offered lung transplants. What if people with COVID-19 who didn’t get the vaccine have to wait in the Emergency Department until everyone else is seen? Should unvaccinated patients just be turned away?

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These are harsh, angry feelings. And some of the people giving voice to them are doctors.

I am an obstetrician in New York. I have been working with pregnant COVID-19 patients from the very beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, in a medical institution and city that have cared for thousands of patients with the disease. Health-care workers have suffered through a terrible year and a half—a period first defined by a lack of masks and gloves, and throughout by the very real fear of personal sickness and death. We have been afraid of bringing the disease home, of infecting our spouses, of leaving our children parentless. For about three months, I didn’t kiss my children.

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