OPINION:
Health care workers are the heroes of the coronavirus crisis. They’re the ones “running into the burning buildings instead of out,” as just about everyone said regarding firefighters in the aftermath of 9/11. The doctors and nurses and orderlies who show up every day, work double- and triple-shifts treating the sick and searching for a cure deserve our thoughts and prayers and gratitude.
Unfortunately, there’s always a bad apple or two lying around that threaten to spoil the bushel. America is dealing with a severe shortage of critical medical supplies needed to deal with the novel coronavirus. Reports are coming in from across the country that we’re short of everything from bed space to bedpans – and most importantly the masks, gloves and other protective equipment needed to, hopefully, prevent the disease from infecting health care workers who will then carry it from patient to patient.
One defense against the shortage has been to ask doctors and nurses to reuse personal protective equipment — now ubiquitously referred to as PPE — until the supply chain can produce what’s needed in the volume necessary to ensure the highest standards of safety and cleanliness are maintained. Everyone is being asked to pitch in but, regrettably, the big labor bosses behind the nurses haven’t gotten the message.
Rather than presenting a united front against COVID-19, nurses across the country are being asked to draw a line that’s effectively politicizing the pandemic. We’ve seen it elsewhere — especially in the way House Speaker Nancy Pelosi insisted on special interest carve-outs in the third stimulus bill to help them gain power they’d otherwise been unable to achieve.
It’s all being done under the guise of raising an alarm over the obvious ways in which America and the health care system were not prepared for the pandemic. You’d think that was old news, something everyone understands now and generally agreed to address later when the time spent pointing fingers of blame isn’t needed to save lives. Nonetheless, nurses in 15 different states are staging protests over this very issue.
What’s the point, really? Hospitals pushed for generous funding from the federal government and got in the stimulus packages. President Donald J. Trump recently invoked the threat of the Defense Production Act, and in one case the act itself, to push American industry into the fight against COVID-19. Others, like My Pillow’s Mike Lindell, joined the fight voluntarily, converting his production line so it could manufacture PPE. We’re playing catch up, and it’s working.
Protesting local hospitals is stupid and unproductive. Preparedness needs to be a national priority and, probably since the end of the Cold War, it hasn’t been — not for anything on this scale anyway. It’s mostly a state function anyway, which is not to excuse the bureaucratic short-sightedness of the federal agencies involved, but there’s plenty of responsibility to go around.
Instead of turning against others within their industry, health care workers across the board should unite to urge government at all levels to give priority to cutting red tape to allow PPE production and distribution to occur faster and on a larger scale. Picking on local hospitals wastes valuable time that should be spent on patient care. The nurses walking the line at the behest of their union bosses have been conned into venting their understandable frustration at the wrong people. It’s not the hospitals that are responsible for the lack of PPE and the other glaring failures of the American economy and health care system to be ready when a crisis like this struck. That failure lies elsewhere, among the government bureaucracies that are supposed to own these issues, among the politicians who failed to oversee them and hold them accountable, and with us — because we didn’t think what used to be called civil defense mattered anymore. Call this a wake-up call for us all and be thankful, as serious as it is, that it’s not worse.
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