VShe last few days have been marked by demonstrations against compulsory vaccination and the health pass. On this occasion, we noted, among the demonstrators, as on social networks, what would be an argument to support the idea that being vaccinated would be useless: the defense of the public hospital.
The rationale would be as follows: successive governments have been destroying the public hospital for years; the number of beds and the means have collapsed, all this in defiance of public health; So let’s start by rehabilitating the hospital and the conditions of care to better manage pandemics before forcing vaccination, say the demonstrators. We, doctors, nurses and caregivers, strongly disagree with this logic.
First of all, we are amazed that so many people suddenly take the defense of the public hospital to heart. Indeed, many of us preached in the desert for years and felt very lonely during the movements organized by the medical and paramedical professions. These operations did not mobilize much outside the medical world, when it came to fighting against new austerity measures imposed on the hospital or against the dispossession of the means of decision-making of caregivers – think of the HPST law. (Hospital, patients, health and territory) in 2009.
To believe that this sudden interest in the cause of the public hospital is in reality only there to dress up in the rags of ethics a refusal to be vaccinated very difficult to justify.
“Citizen, ethical and responsible act”
We, caregivers, have been living from the inside, for a year and a half now, the Covid-19 crisis, which has only sharply revealed what we already knew: too many beds have been closed. There are no longer enough human and material resources in the hospital and, fundamentally, the just-in-time logic cannot be applied to a strategic sector such as health, which must be able to quickly absorb a health crisis. of magnitude.
The most mobilized care sectors are at the end of their rope, affected for a long time by staff hemorrhages. As a result, the pandemic has severely tested these healthcare teams who ask only one thing: to get out of the crisis. We also see, too often, the ravages of the pandemic in terms of delayed diagnosis and management of other pathologies. Delays which, sometimes, seriously strain the survival of patients, in particular in oncology.
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