In a piece at New Yorker by Dhruv Khullar on the reasons that health care workers are declining or at least delaying vaccination, this passage caught my eye:
Another major hurdle is mistrust of both the political and the health-care systems. The problem is most acute in historically marginalized communities, which already live with racial disparities in life expectancy, maternal mortality, access to medical care, representation in clinical trials, informed consent, the physician workforce, and covid-19 outcomes. And it’s exacerbated among health-care workers who are underappreciated and poorly paid. “In many cases, vaccine hesitancy is not a lack-of-information problem. It’s a lack-of-trust problem,†David Grabowski, a professor of health-care policy at Harvard, told me. “Staff doesn’t trust leadership. They have a real skepticism of government. They haven’t gotten hazard pay. They haven’t gotten P.P.E. They haven’t gotten respect. Should we be surprised that they’re skeptical of something that feels like it’s being forced on them?â€
I’ve written about trust before here. Trust is not the default position, especially among Americans. It’s hard to earn, easy to lose, and once lost even more difficult to regain. Waffling positions or even worse having it revealed that the positions you took a couple of months ago were self-serving undermines trust.
“Waffling positions or even worse having it revealed that the positions you took a couple of months ago were self-serving undermines trust.”
Have you noticed “children in cages” has given way in press accounts to “overflow capacity” because, well, “you can’t have children just roaming the streets” you know. You know?
Or how about the sudden propensity of politicians to let indoor dining or school openings proceed.
Or Clinesmith getting probation for forging documents used to obtain FISA warrants…….
Or how about……………..
Distrust in American institutions. Gee, I wonder why.
I’m sorry, the whole passage smacks of paternalism and and homage to the new popular face of racism called privilege.
No surprise the sentiment comes out of Harvard via the New Yorker.
“Poorly paid health care workers”? Overworked, maybe. Underpaid?
The ones I see tend to be younger and healthier than the average American.
Maybe they just like their chances.
According to the Census Bureau the median age of Americans is 38.2. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics the median age of health care workers is 42.1 for hospitals and 43.7 for health care workers outside of hospitals.
Sanity:
https://principia-scientific.com/uk-covid-conundrum-the-mysterious-case-of-disappearing-flu/
That’s not a trustworthy source.
The citations are very similar to the CDC published numbers I cited a week or so ago. I yield to no one in skepticism of “studies” or “facts,” including the CDC. The sudden “disappearance” of ordinary flu, the now admitted huge false positive rates on Ct tests, the anomalies and restatements in all death statistics etc don’t make for trust in institutions, especially when you consider the political motivations.
There is not any mystery on the decline of influenza cases this year.
Influenza has an estimated R of between 1 and 2; while SARS-COV2 has an estimated R of between 2 and 4.
The social measures taken due to COVID (social distancing / masks etc) do have an effect. They lowered influenza’s R to significantly below 1 which follows that the disease will tend to disappear as it has done. It also lowered SARS-COV2’s R but only to around 1.
But the recent decline of COVID cases, especially in California, needs explanation. Are we closer to herd immunity than thought?
I dont know who the guy is who wrote Drew’s article, but certainly not a recognizable name and doesn’t appear to be someone who is current on clinical practice. Many hospitals, like ours, our using a multi test for Covid so that we can test for flu at the same time. Link goes to just one of many articles on this. The system cited uses the Thermo Fisher brand, which we also use. A lot of places use the CDC multi test which IIRC does just Flu A, Flu B and Covid. We used the Ceheid test before we changed to Thermo. All of the results i have seen reported out in our test results for many weeks now list flu along with Covid (and RSV). Since we are testing for it and not seeing it I suspect CO is correct. (Seriously, if you actually read literature on a regular basis there are lots of red flags telling you that the guy is just writing an opinion piece and one not informed by current practice.)
There have not been major anomalies in death statistics, just people using them who have never done so before and have no idea of the actual reporting times and how they work, or people making up stuff.
For California I think there are a couple fo explanations. When there are lots of hospitalizations and people start dying people start to distance more and wear masks. Even in our die hard areas in coal country where the signs say “No masks allowed” once their local hospital was overflowing, nearly everyone in the local nursing home died or had an ICU stay, and lots of people were just sick we started seeing people wear masks.
https://kutv.com/news/local/utah-lab-now-offers-4-1-test-to-help-detect-covid-19-flu-rsv
Back on topic after dealing with the detour into cloud cuckoo land, the relationship between management and a lot of health care workers is poor. At one failing hospital we took over staff really were underpaid (a lot of them also sucked) and the hospital management tolerated physicians physical abusing female nurses. We have turned the place around but there are other places like that around and staff do not trust management. Even in well run places hospitals can be abusive of staff so staff may not be so trusting, especially the lesser paid staff.
Steve
Anecdotally, I don’t believe any ‘distrust’ by hospital staff is any different than other professions. For example, teachers distrust administration and their plans to reopen in-person classroom teaching during the pandemic.
I believe the real problem is that as Americans we do not want to be told what to do. We hang on the ideals of personal freedom and independence above an authority that makes our decisions. When there is distrust of that authority and their message, the task of persuading individuals to ‘do the right thing’ becomes extremely difficult if not impossible. As a result, decisions are influenced by either fear or information from non-authority sources (both good and bad).