Arsonists sometimes take up firefighting to cover their enthusiasm for setting fires. I’ve discovered health care workers who are just as nefarious: They cover their enthusiasm for death with scrubs or a white jacket as they go to work with our most vulnerable.
The pandemic is giving us a valuable opportunity to identify these health care workers. I work as a nursing home medical director in southern Maine. Our small practice alone has seen three homes, in the last few months, experience outbreaks that entered the facilities via unvaccinated workers. If they don’t believe science, they shouldn’t be in health care. And if they do believe science, then what does that say about their intentions?
Because of chronic illness, many who call these facilities home continue to die from COVID-19 despite being fully vaccinated. Unvaccinated “health care workers” who enter a home and spread death to our most vulnerable should be called out as clearly as “firefighters” entering a dry forest with matches.
Bill Burge, M.D., CMD
clinical assistant professor, departments of primary care and geriatric medicine,
University of New England College of Osteopathic Medicine
Portland
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