To the point of the Guardian, it is people, not rates, that occupy beds at hospitals. Even if only one person in the UK or in Canada remained unvaccinated and ended up hospitalized or dead (100% rate of hospitalization/death for the unvaxxinated), could you really say that that one person is ‘clogging the hospitals”?
Health services experts know well that about 20% of the population consumes about 80% of health services. This is a feature of populations – in any population there will always be people who are older, have ‘bad’ behaviours so end up sicker (or are seen as having them depending on the politics of the times), or are sicker for whatever reason, and so on.
But I would think that most people in this forum do not go around moralizing about health behaviours, whether it is failing to eat healthfully, exercising, and losing weight, or to stop smoking, drinking, etc., however good these behaviours may be to increase several times your chances of not dying – to classify your patients between deserving and undeserving and refuse them care. In bioethics this issue has been settled a long time ago with the case of smokers.
More to the point, the ‘unvaxxed’ clogging hospitals? Not in Canada or the UK. The attached pictures from Public Health Ontario clearly show that most ICU beds are not-covid (57% vs. 21%) and that 27% of ICU beds are empty. And since Omicron, both case counts and rates have gone through the roof, apparently much more so among the double (or triple) vaxxed. There are a few interesting hypotheses out there that allude to how our complex immune system works.
In the UK (p. 43, 44 and 45 in the latest report), most cases, hospitalizations and deaths are ocuring among vaccinated patients (some even triple vaxxed). https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-vaccine-weekly-surveillance-reports
Finally, if both vaxxed and unvaxxed have roughly equal viral loads and can transmit the virus equally (Secondary
Attack Rates among vaccinated 25%, unvaxxinated 23%, so lower capacity to trasmit, the Lancet Infectious Diseases), in other way, you cannot separate ‘us’ from ‘them’ with
vaccination, what is the public health rationale for mandates?
Let me set aside for now the issue of NNT and NNV (Numbers Needed to Treat and Numbers Needed to Vaccinate), basic but very important epidemiological concepts when it comes to assessing the benefits and harms of any medical intervention, whether covid vaccines
or Lipitor for your blood cholesterol (tip: the estimated NNV for covid vaccines is over 1,000, not promising to say the least). I have information to share if anybody is interested but I suspect there are epidemiologists in this forum much more apt than me
to discuss this topic.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html
And of course the very sick anti-vaxxers are killing others by clogging up hospitals and preventing needed care.
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Dennis Raphael, PhD
Professor of Health Policy and Management
York University
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Website:
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Of interest:
The Politics of Health in the Canadian Welfare State
https://www.canadianscholars.ca/books/the-politics-of-health-in-the-canadian-welfare-state
Poverty in Canada, 3rd edition,
Forewords by Cathy Crowe, Rob Ranier and Jack Layton
https://www.canadianscholars.ca/books/poverty-in-canada-d3408482-0caa-489a-8a76-7faf7587d00a
Staying Alive: Critical Perspectives on Health, Illness, and Health Care, 3rd edition
Foreword by Gary Teeple
https://www.canadianscholars.ca/books/staying-alive
Social Determinants of Health: Canadian Perspectives, 3rd edition
Forewords by Michael Butler and Maude Barlow, Carolyn Bennett and Roy Romanow
http://tinyurl.com/hm5l4hn
Immigration, Public Policy, and Health: Newcomer Experiences in Developed Nations
http://www.cspi.org/books/immigration-public-policy-and-health
About Canada: Health and Illness, 2nd edition
https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/about-canada-health-and-illness
Tackling Health Inequalities: Lessons from International Experiences
Foreword by Alex Scott-Samuel
http://www.cspi.org/books/tackling_health_inequalities
Health Promotion and Quality of Life in Canada: Essential Readings
http://tinyurl.com/3C8zteu
See a presentation! The Political Economy of Health Inequalities.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NCTYqAub8g
Also, presentation at the University of Toronto on how Canada stacks up again other nations in providing citizens with economic and social security.
http://vimeo.com/33346501
See what Jack Layton had to say about my books!
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2011/04/10/cv-election-ndp-layton-platform.html
at 27:20