The political weaponization of health care wasn’t a uniquely American phenomenon. In Europe it was even more extreme with the UK’s “Clap for the NHS” ethos. The media portrayed health care staffers as if they were laboring around the clock in death pits saving lives.
For the most part this was not true.
To the extent that medical staffers in America were overburdened, it was because ObamaCare had conspired to consolidate and close hospitals, and the flood of illegal aliens had reduced ER services with some hospitals closing them entirely. In the decade since, I’ve seen ERs in even good hospitals in major cities operate like they were city hospitals in ghettos with waiting rooms full of moaning people lying on the floor for 8-10 hours. And that was long before COVID. I don’t know what it’s like now, but I’m not surprised that it’s terrible.
And the terribleness is a pre-existing condition.
ERs have always been the worst part of American health care. The one part that even I can’t defend when challenged by foreigners. ObamaCare and the welfare state with its train of illegal aliens made them even worse than they were.
Rather than take risks, many hospitals simply intubated coronavirus patients preemptively to protect their staff which amounted to a death sentence for many patients, especially the elderly.
That’s one of the untold stories of the pandemic.
But the media mobilized health care workers as players in its political narrative because it was a convenient means of shaming anyone who disagreed with the lockdowns, because it empowered left-wing nursing unions, and it shifted the gravity of support away from professions that they didn’t like, like the military and the police, over to a profession where it had much more sway.
Fast forward to the era of the vaccine mandates, and thousands of health care workers are being fired, while the media focuses on supposed threats and attacks on some health care workers. The narrative is being sustained, but the truth of the narrative is that the only health care workers the leftists think are heroes are those who agree with them.
The measure of heroism isn’t laboring in an ICU, it’s agreeing with the Left’s politics and promoting its narrative. It’s not what you do that counts, but what you believe and how useful you are politically.
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