As a doctor I am used to taking responsibility. I take responsibility when I recommend taking a drug. I take responsibility when I recommend the patient to perform a test. I take responsibility when I send a patient for surgery. I take responsibility when I inject anesthesia into a patient, feminize him and control all the vital systems of his body. I take responsibility when I tell the family that we have done everything and there is nothing more to do.
The responsibility I take stems from my role. For this purpose, I rely on knowledge accumulated in the world of medicine. My patients expect me to stay up to date, and I will consult with colleagues and senior executives when I am not sure what the right move is. If God forbid I fail, the responsibility will also go to court. But most of all – the responsibility stems from a sense of commitment.
Vaccines for the entire population // Photo: Moshe Ben Simhon, Newsenders
I am in favor of the right to vote. As a believer I think that the commandment and choice in life sharpens the right of choice granted to us. At the end of the 19th century in London, a fierce debate broke out in the Jewish community between supporters and opponents of the smallpox vaccine. The hand of vaccine supporters has increased. Imagine how many glorious British Jewish families would not exist today if vaccine opponents were growing.
It is important to understand what the options are. Some people think that the choice is between getting vaccinated and risking rare and unknown side effects – or not getting vaccinated and avoiding these side effects. But this is not the case. The choice is between getting vaccinated and suffering from ignorance (minimal in my eyes) and suffering from corona where the chance of dying is 7 out of 1,000 and the chance of being left with prolonged symptoms for months and maybe even years is high. Even if you have won and survived the virus, there are long-term injuries to, among other things, the heart, health and brain.
In the face of the medical world that takes responsibility, there are irresponsible people. People who spread unfounded or false rumors that the vaccines are dangerous. Shorten the sheet from refuting the false claims and that is not the purpose of this column. Anyone who wants to will find countless articles about it on the net and in the written press.
I’m talking about irresponsibility. None of the vaccine opponents will take responsibility and say “I was wrong” when people get hurt. There will not be any of them who will face a family worried about the fate of the grandfather when it came up in the oxygen consumption behind the closed doors of the corona ward. There will be no one to take responsibility for calling the family of the patient who was resuscitated because her lungs could no longer withstand the effort. As a result of corona, not the flu. Corona which today is a preventable disease. Vaccine opponents are not seen standing next to a tearful family that separates from the son who died from the coronary, not the flu. A preventable disease. And it happens every day, time after time. Not an abstract, possible, virtual danger, but a real and everyday pain that can be prevented.
Those vaccine opponents are welcome to join me or any medical staff, who are responsible, to visit the ward or intensive care unit. Let them understand what responsibility is taken for. The same celebrities and those they follow do not bear responsibility and therefore they act irresponsibly. Absolute irresponsibility. Lethal irresponsibility.
I take responsibility and call on everyone to get vaccinated. I call on everyone to take responsibility for their relatives and bring them to the vaccine. And you chose life. Take responsibility. We got vaccinated. now. That it will not be too late.
The writer is a doctor in the corona ward at Meir Hospital in Kfar Saba