Every day, doctors are exhausted fighting two problems that appear to be an endless fight – the surge of delta variant COVID-19 cases that are claiming thousands of lives daily and the rise of vaccine misinformation.
Three doctors shared their stories with the Associated Press of how they battle misinformation regarding the COVID-19 vaccine and treat thousands of sick people.
Misinformation Doctors Face Over COVID-19 Vaccine
According to Dr. Stu, Coffman via Associated Press, an emergency room physician of Envision Healthcare, they were heroes, and everybody was clapping for them a year ago. But now, they are “being, in some areas, harassed and disbelieved and ridiculed over what we are trying to do.”
Doctor Vincent Shaw of Baton Rouge General also shared to Associated Press the three most common misinformation about the vaccine.
“The most common is, “I’m not sure what’s in the vaccine. The second would be “they came up with the vaccine too fast. The third is, I haven’t done enough research.”
For Dr. Carl Lambert of Rush University Medical Center, the most common misinformation he hears is there’s a chip in the vaccine “that it takes over your DNA, and it gets into your genome, which is impossible scientifically.”
Coffman also said that he wishes for those people who do not believe in the vaccine or those who have reasons for not taking it, that one day, they wind up in the ICU and walk by the beds to see “unvaccinated, unvaccinated, unvaccinated” patients.
Shaw believes that patients have their personal choice, but though he took an oath to treat patients, his choice is taken away because he is now “forced to treat” patients because of “poor decisions or a poor choice, based on flawed information and flawed judgments.”
Lambert tries to talk to patients who don’t believe in the vaccine and accepts that there’s a lot of information out there, but he’s glad to talk about it and clear things up, he told Associated Press.
In the U.S., 185 Million Americans are fully vaccinated, just 56.3% of the total population.
