I realize it's been quite a while since I taught - or was in school myself - but I'm distressed…
Morning Headlines 12/29/20
Health startup seeks to bring COVID-19 vaccine tracking to Apple Wallet
Los Angeles County chooses Healthvana to allow people to present proof of COVID-19 vaccination as stored in Apple Wallet and to receive reminders when their second shot is due.
Home DNA test unicorn 23andMe raises nearly $85M
The company was laying off employees a year ago in citing declining consumer demand.
‘Toxic Individualism’: Pandemic Politics Driving Health Care Workers From Small Towns
Healthcare workers are moving away from their rural communities after being harassed by their neighbors for providing public health advice, challenging rural hospitals that were already struggling to fill clinical positions during the pandemic.
Re: open hostility toward rural health workers. It’s not just toxic individualism, it’s toxic exceptionalism with a dash of oppositional defiance disorder. An “individual” would carefully consider their options and act in their own best interest. These people defy guidelines just to prove no one will stop them. People who quite literally believe they should be allowed to do what they want at the direct expense of others. The idea that they are uniquely capable, but others deserve generalizations. It permeates a person’s identity from top to bottom. From their basic idea of self, up to their idea of country and citizenship. It is a strange bastardization of the concept of “American Freedom” – that practicing your legal right to endanger others is somehow patriotic and noble. The same people who rant about freedom and tyranny would do well to read about the smallpox epidemic that began in 1775. We have direct insight into how the Founders acted during a disease outbreak.. And I can assure you they did not act in the interest of individual freedom, because they were intelligent and principled enough to understand responsible population health management even then. The United States doesn’t have a COVID crisis as much as we have a selfishness crisis. Once COVID is mostly resigned to memory, and we’ve patted ourselves on the back in countless TV specials for inventing a vaccine at Warp Speed, the dangerous attitudes that allowed COVID to spread with such ease will remain.
And for those of us who are old enough to remember Pogo from 1971: “We have me the enemy and he is us.”
https://library.osu.edu/site/40stories/2020/01/05/we-have-met-the-enemy/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/12/31/covid-vaccines-destroyed-wisconsin-hospital/
Another pleasant reminder that there is a minority of healthcare workers who believe that COVID isn’t real, or at least it isn’t that bad. I know too many healthcare workers who are anti-vaxxers under the guise of “just asking questions”. I know an HIS database admin who says his wife works in claims, and she’s “seen the numbers” and knows that COVID isn’t real and we’re making this all up. We choose to believe outlandish explanations rather than accept that yes, a lot more people than normal are dying, and parts of the country are having major staffing and capacity crises because COVID IS that bad. And yes, the anti-vaxx beliefs you came up with all on your own are actually deliberate misinformation fed to you via people who have something to sell, or via social media bots managed by foreign countries with an interest in making the United States look stupid and weak. And we have a whole political party that promotes these attitudes as “freedom” to score cheap points with voting morons.
Everything you said, but to add to it, there is also religious objections being thrown around — specifically around the method of research using stem cell lines.
We will see in the coming days if the pharmacist was objecting due to religious principles, anti-vaxx, fake virus, or just plain sociopathy.
I am afraid disassociation with the truth and manufactured facts are going to impact us for a while. I miss the days when all we had to worry about was cargo cult science