Nebraska Doctors Despondent at the Preventable Suffering
Mark Rupp has grown numb to people yelling that he’s wrong about the COVID-19 vaccine.
“I have certainly experienced plenty of that,” he says dryly.
This is Dr. Mark Rupp, Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of Nebraska Medical Center and the medical director for infection control at Nebraska Medicine. Dr. Mark Rupp, author or co-author of 137 scientific papers on infectious diseases, including “Effect of SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccination in Healthcare Workers” and “The Case of Novel Coronavirus Disease.”
People are coming into Rupp’s office and telling him — a nationally-renowned expert on infectious diseases — that he’s dead wrong on the treatment for an infectious disease. These people are his patients.
It’s like a beer-league softball player trying to school Mike Trout on how to hit a 93-mph slider. Or an audience member yanking the cello out of Yo-Yo Ma’s hands to show him how it’s really done. It seems funny, almost. Until you hear the hard edge in Dr. Mark Rupp’s voice.
“It’s going to cause, it’s already causing, an awful lot of suffering that simply isn’t necessary,” he says. “That is the most frustrating, awful part.”
More than nine months after vaccines started going into arms, Nebraska medical experts cannot quite believe that more of us won’t get jabbed.
It’s wearing on them.
“I’m way past burnt out,” says Dr. Andrea Jones, a Nebraska Medicine family medicine physician who has spent much of the past 18 months caring for COVID-19 patients. “... What’s it going to take for people to do the right thing?
“I’m going to be honest. It’s really made me question my faith in humanity.”
Jones says she has told family members that their loved one’s heart is damaged, or their liver is failing, and they have laughed in her face.
That’s ridiculous, they say. COVID can’t do that.
“These people are in complete denial,” Jones says.
It was easier last year, when no hospitalized Nebraskan had access to a vaccine. Now, it’s hard for Jones and the doctors and nurses around her to ignore that the vast majority of the COVID patients are Nebraskans who made the decision not to get vaccinated.
How stark is this vaccinated-unvaccinated divide in hospitals?
Bryan Medical Center in Lincoln recently released numbers to illustrate the difference.
On Aug. 19, 60 of the 67 Bryan patients hospitalized for COVID-19 were unvaccinated. Sixteen of the 17 patients in intensive care were unvaccinated. Thirteen of the 14 patients on ventilators were unvaccinated.
As Jones makes her Nebraska Medicine rounds caring for unvaccinated patients, she catches herself thinking things like, “It’s completely your fault that you are here with me right now.”
Jones daydreams about asking her patients to appear in an ad campaign similar to the anti-smoking commercials that showed longtime smokers speaking through voice boxes.
In the Panhandle Public Health District, department director Kim Engel, her staff and hospital partners across the region hold out hope.
The group starts each week with a renewed sense that this week will be better, that the local politician who just came out in support of vaccination will move a few people, and news about the Delta variant will move a few more.
Most weeks end in disappointment. Recently, a vaccination clinic in Ogallala, just east of the Health District, had to be cancelled after the clinic’s staff received threats.
“Early on, we should have decided that the enemy was the virus, and we could have united with a common goal as citizens, as Americans. Instead, as it rolled out, we decided that the enemy is a mask, or the enemy is a vaccine, and we turned on each other,” Engel says.
Eighteen months into a pandemic, doctors and public health experts are struggling to hold onto hope.
Rupp’s hope is that people will continue to come off the fence, joining the upswing in vaccination that lasted through August. But his hope is hanging by a thread.
“It’s like people say, ‘Here’s another positive message, how boring. The vaccine is 95% effective, nah, I’m going to spend my time looking into this conspiracy that Bill Gates is microchipping that vaccine!’”
He pauses to collect himself.
“We’re having an argument where we shouldn’t be arguing,” Rupp said. “Because there simply isn’t any argument.”
This story was originally published by Flatwater Free Press, an independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories in Nebraska that matter. Learn more at flatwaterfreepress.org.
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