“COVID-deniers” and “anti-vaxxers” should opt out of care in the public health system if they catch the virus, says the President of British Columbia’s Nurses and Doctors Medical Association.
The BCNDMA president, Dr Roderick McGillivray, said those who do not believe COVID-19 is real or a threat should update their advanced care directives and inform their relatives that they do not wish to receive care in the public health system if diagnosed with the virus.
As restrictions continue to lift across the province, where nearly 90% of B.C. residents over the age of 12 have received their first vaccine dose, and more than 83% are fully vaccinated, although British Columbia is still recording high daily case numbers, with 715 new cases reported on Thursday, high vaccination combined with lower than predicted length of stays in hospital has given the government confidence the health care system will cope with measures lifting earlier than first anticipated.
But McGillivray, who is an intensive care physician and an anaesthetist, said health care workers were fatigued from lockdowns, COVID-19 outbreaks, and pressures on the health system, including staff shortages that existed before the pandemic.
“Within the public hospitals, the knees are knocking as restrictions ease, because the situation is stressed to the point that in rural areas of our province tents are going up outside of the public hospitals to facilitate the removal of ill patients from ambulances, so those ambulances can go and get the next patient,” he said.
Health workers would also be grappling in coming months with a backlog of patients who had been forced to delay their elective surgery because hospitals and staff were being redirected to treat COVID patients.
“So these patients continue to suffer some pain or disability for a longer period of time, and they’re often patients who’ve been double vaccinated, they’re elderly, and they’ve done everything right, but their knee replacement is being delayed and the public hospital waiting lists are growing,” McGillivray said.
“We’re all juggling everything the best we can to avoid and prevent deaths. We know as we reopen it’s the unvaccinated who are going to get COVID, and they are going to get great hospital treatment with many new experimental drugs, even though they think the vaccine is ‘experimental’.
“A whole lot of these people are passionate disbelievers that the virus even exists. And they should notify their nearest and dearest and ensure there’s an advanced care directive that says, ‘If I am diagnosed with this disease caused by a virus that I don’t believe exists, I will not disturb the public hospital system, and I’ll let nature run its course’.”
Note: The BCNDMA does not exist, and Dr Roderick McGillivray is a fictional construct. That said, in the Australian state of Victoria, the president of the Victoria chapter of the Australian Medical Association, Dr Roderick McRae, did make the statement recorded above, as reported today in The Guardian.
