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Will Doctors Refusing Service For Unvaccinated Patients Also Refuse Treatment For Obese People?

Obesity
Image CreditTony Alter/ Flickr

If doctors are rationing care based on those who pledge adherence to a healthy lifestyle, only a minority of Americans would qualify. 

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South Florida doctors want you to know they’re upset with the careers they’ve chosen.

On Monday, a group of 75 physicians staged a protest over unvaccinated COVID patients seeking hospital care.

“We are exhausted,” Dr. Rupesh Dharia of Palm Beach Internal Medicine told a local NBC affiliate. “Our patience and resources are running low.”

While it appears no patients were denied treatment from the group staging this week’s demonstration (yet), doctors elsewhere have taken the leap to refuse care for those who decline to vaccinate themselves from COVID-19. A North Texas hospital flirted with the idea in an internal memo if intensive care units (ICUs) reach capacity, and an Alabama doctor wrote to patients that starting in October, their practice will “no longer see patients that are not vaccinated against COVID-19.”

“I cannot and will not force anyone to take the vaccine,” Dr. Jason Valentine of Mobile, Alabama, wrote. “I also cannot continue to watch my patients suffer and die from an eminently preventable disease.”

In other words, only healthy people deserve medical treatment, which exists to cure people who aren’t healthy.

Will Valentine treat people who are obese? What about those suffering complications from drug addiction? Smokers? STDs? HIV? Diabetes 2? Liver disease? Mouth cancer? Lung cancer? Hepatitis? An aggressively healthy lifestyle can prevent all of the above. When reached for comment, Valentine’s office simply hung up.

Instead, Americans have celebrated an overindulgence on copious amounts of carbs and sugar along with a sedentary lifestyle under lockdown in the name of public health, exacerbating addiction to illicit substances in the process. Those who promote healthy living, on the other hand, are demonized as fat-phobic and even racist or anti-science, while television shows based on morbidly obese people entertain a nationwide audience.

Tobacco use is the leading cause of preventable death in the United States, followed by obesity, which both dramatically raise individual susceptibility to complications from COVID-19. This is especially true of obesity, which affects more than 40 percent of Americans, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 70 percent of those 20 years old and older are considered overweight.

If doctors are rationing care based on those who pledge adherence to a healthy lifestyle, only a minority of Americans would qualify.