We are all familiar by now with the way The Donald has chastised and muzzled Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s foremost authority on viruses, particularly the one driving the Covid-19 pandemic. In response to Fauci’s having talked on his own to TV interviewers and late-night hosts, Trump has apparently kept him from even showing up at his daily pressers about the virus, which are indeed nothing but political ads for the “great job” his administration is allegedly doing. Fauci, with his realism and truth-telling, is decidedly not contributing to that political dog-and-pony show. In my opinion, the good doctor should have resigned long ago to dramatize the lies and criminal negligence of the president*, but he (and many others) seems to think he can help the nation (as the only real source of medical sense) by swallowing his pride and remaining where he is. But that’s a story for another time.
What’s alarming and outraging me now is the way that doctors and nurses, the very ones protecting and caring for us all on the front lines, are now being punished for trying to protect themselves. Nicholas Kristof wrote a recent article in the New York Times specifically addressing this, and it leaves one infuriated. On April 1, he wrote about several cases he’s found of nurses and/or doctors actually being fired for speaking up about the lack of good protective equipment (now known as PPEs, Personal Protective Equipment) in the hospitals in which they toil. This at a time when, as Kristof points out, at least 61 doctors and nurses have died in Italy from the coronavirus, and when in New York city two nurses have already died and “more than 200 workers are reported sick at a single major hospital.” The first punishment case he cites recounts the firing of a doctor in Bellingham, WA:
…an ER doctor, Ming Lin, pleaded on social media for better protections for patients and the staff at PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center, where he had worked for 17 years… “I do fear for my staff” Dr. Lin warned. “Morally, I think when you see something wrong, you have to speak out.”
But the hospital CEO, Charles Prosper, fired Lin for his insubordination, and refused to speak to Kristof about this, stating only that he regretted losing (note this cowardly language, as if Lin has somehow been misplaced through no fault of Prosper’s own) “such a longstanding and talented member of our medical staff.” To me, and to Kristof, this is an outrage. It as if the hospitals conduct business from the same playbook as did acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly, when he fired the commander of the aircraft carrier, USS Theodore Roosevelt. Why? Because Commander Brett Crozier had sounded the alarm about a Covid-19 outbreak on his huge ship, and pleaded that 90% of his 3,000 men be removed for their safety. But like Lin, he did it publicly, sending letters outside his chain of command to ask for help; whereupon Modly said, in explaining the firing, that Crozier had “demonstrated extremely poor judgement in the midst of a crisis” (defenseone.com). Modly added that “And that’s what’s frustrating about it: it created the perception that the Navy’s not on the job, and the government’s not on the job” (ibid). And there you have it. In these days where perception –especially in the media---is all, anything that makes the boss look bad or incompetent (even though most of them are) must be punished, and the whistleblower banished, one way or the other.
It has gotten so bad, Kristof tells us, that hospitals actually “discourage staffers even from bringing their own protective gear.” You read that right. A Physician at the Weill Cornell Medical Center in NY city, ER doctor Ania Ringwelski, judging that the equipment provided by Weill was not good enough, got her own. The hospital administration not only rejected her initiative, but they sent the doctor home. To demonstrate that the issue is more serious than simple preferences, Kristof points out that at least one ER doctor at this hospital is already fighting to breathe on a ventilator. Another doctor from the same ER, afraid of being fired if he allowed his name to be used, added, “We’re seeing our fellow caregivers getting sick, and we’re stressed out.” Is this total insanity, or what?
Nor does it end there. In Chicago, nurse Lauri Mazurkiewicz not only warned her co-workers that standard-issue face masks were not good enough to protect them, but purchased her own N95 mask and brought it to work at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. She was promptly fired—presumably for her implied criticism of the hospital-distributed masks. Another resident at a New York hospital underscored the same problem, saying (again, not allowing his name to be used for fear of punishment) that “We still don’t have enough masks, we still don’t have enough gowns…Our necks are exposed, our hair is exposed and our colleagues are getting sick.”
To be sure, it’s not just health care workers who are castigated for pointing out how dire the situation is. In a recent article on Yahoo News, the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, points out why Detroit is facing an imminent crisis. And it will not surprise anyone to learn that the cause is the same, only amplified by the relatively poor health of Detroit’s majority, whose poverty rate is an astonishing 35%. That is, Detroit’s health care workers and also its first responders lack PPEs, personal protective equipment. As much as one-fifth of the police force is already in quarantine, this coming on the heels of the recent deaths if the city’s homicide chief and the jailhouse commander (businessinsider.com). Governor Whitmer also told Trevor Noah that with the poverty—and its attendant ills such as asthma, diabetes, and other problems including poor access to basic healthcare—the population of Detroit was at greater risk than more affluent places and needed help. Of course, as should be expected by now, the Michigan governor, a Democrat, received a tongue-lashing from the president*, who, after she criticized the feds for “not taking the virus pandemic early enough or seriously enough,” told her and other governors that they are on their own when it comes to supplies, singling her out, as is his wont, as the “Failing Michigan governor.” He also called her a “half-whit (sic).”
And that gets to the core of the problem here. The president*, who downplayed the pandemic for months, and smarting from the criticisms that hospitals are in dire need of equipment that the federal government, had it acted earlier, should have been able to supply, has viciously attacked the very caregivers that ought to be encouraged and appreciated (which average citizens have been doing.) Nina Golgowski, in an April 2 article on huffpost.com, points out some of the most egregious of Trump’s recent attacks. Raging on his favorite (because he can’t be immediately challenged as in a press conference) medium, Twitter, Trump wrote that hospitals who requested medical supplies to cope with the pandemic were nothing but “complainers” who should have stocked up on their own supplies “long before the crisis hit.” He added that “Some have insatiable appetites & are never satisfied,” and in another rampage accused individual hospitals and their staffs of hoarding masks and possibly “worse than hoarding” i.e. stealing them. These are the people on the front lines of what the president* now calls a war. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that this cowardly draft dodger would criticize those actually doing battle. But we are. No matter how often we see evidence of this man’s heartlessness, his utter void where a presumptive compassion gene should be, it still astonishes us that a human being (presumably) could be so zealous to shift blame from himself to anyone lower down on the food chain. Like mere hospitals, mere workers, mere lifesavers. Like the people who actually take responsibility for the lives of others.
No. The constant message from this president*, this administration, is always the same: regardless of the problem, don’t make us look bad. And if you do, you’ll be muzzled at best, attacked viciously and/or fired unceremoniously at worst. So is it any wonder that hospital CEOs fired their hirelings for complaining that they lacked the equipment needed to preserve their lives? Is it any wonder that the acting head of the Navy fired a commander for trying to save the lives of his crew? They’re all, these presumptive leaders, following the example of the Chief—who is the perfect exemplar of the whole rotten system; whose fundamental credo is, stamp out negative publicity without mercy. For that is the one thing a capitalist system that has lost its reason for being (to produce goods better than its competitors) cannot tolerate. The products can be shitty. No problem. They can kill people for lack of quality control. No Problem. They can be held back in a crisis until the price can be raised sky high. No problem. But don’t let the word get out about any of it, for that might bring down the whole ship.
No, the answer is always to blow the public relations horn loud and often, and outshout any negative little shits who want to tell the truth. Bury them. And the ignorant hordes will believe, because they too want to support the blamers. The happy talkers. The ones who reiterate, over and over again (as the president* did recently) their mantra of avoiding culpability and shifting it to the silly underlings who actually do the work:
“You know, we’re not a shipping clerk. We’ll help out wherever we can.”
Has there ever been such a heartless bastard setting the moral compass for an already morally-challenged nation?
Lawrence DiStasi
Prof. Distasi, thanks for all your good observations. What can we do? Obviously, as long as we have our non-leader-in-chief "running" things, we are cooked.
ReplyDelete