David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic, said that hospitals should be allowed to make those who have not been vaccinated against COVID-19 the bottom priority for emergency care.
“You want to fulminate against the dumb-ass malignity of the anti-vaxxers and their (quietly personally vaxxed) media and political enablers? Go ahead, I do it myself almost every day right here in this space,” Frum tweeted on Sunday. “But the malignant minority is not yielding to reason any time soon. And even such seemingly basic mandates as ‘no jab, no fly’ seem beyond the enforcement capability of the US federal government. So what now?”
Frum laid out four points, the first three of which included promoting vaccines and booster shots, establishing vaccine mandates where possible, and getting back to normalcy to the extent possible, particularly regarding schools.
But for his fourth point, Frum wrote, “Let hospitals quietly triage emergency care to serve the unvaccinated last.”
Unsurprisingly, Frum’s suggestion did not sit well with many people on social media.
“If calling on health care professionals to conspire against the unvaccinated isn’t evil, I’m not sure what would be,” tweeted Western Journal editor-in-chief George Upper.
“This is immorality dressed up as arrogant pomposity,” another person tweeted.
“This is such a bad take. Ignoring the first 3 points, let’s jump to the last. Advocating for a tiered discriminatory system of treating sick humans is sick in and of itself. Disgusting! This leads to bad things and bad outcomes not to mention it is pure evil. Where does it end?” another person wrote.
“Covid has really brought our peoples true colors. Little authoritarians everywhere,” someone else tweeted.
“I understand the anger many of us have towards people who choose to remain unvaccinated. We just can’t triage emergency care in this way. Whether there should be an insurance surcharge or other financial consequence for people who choose to be unvaccinated—that’s another matter,” another individual tweeted.
Frum stood by his tweet and asserted that those who have not yet been vaccinated “are a cause of the victimization of vulnerable others.”
“Reading the reactions to this tweet, I am impressed by the immense self-pity of the anti-vaxxers – who see themselves as bottomless victims, even as their own bad choices deny hospital care to so many others in desperate need,” Frum tweeted. “If, at this point, you are still unvaccinated, you are not a victim. You are a cause of the victimization of vulnerable others.”