They risk their lives to protect people from COVID, and yet face ridicule and attacks
Heidi Lucas, director of the Missouri Nurses Association, says families are demanding unproven treatments for their loved ones with COVID-19, and don’t always take it well when those requests are turned aside.
“After working to the point of exhaustion and witnessing needless deaths,” tweeted a woman whose stepdaughter is a nurse in the area, “she is now advised by the hospital to take off her scrubs while in public because of threats.”
It isn’t just nurses. In Springfield, an anti-vaccine protest threatened Walmart pharmacists. “What they’re doing is crimes against humanity,” anti-vaxxer Christopher Key wrote on Facebook. “And if they do not stand down immediately, then they could be executed.”
Serious harassment of front-line COVID workers appears to be growing, and it must stop. Immediately.
Nurses, doctors and other health care workers should not face belligerent confrontations with patients whose lives they’re trying to save. Teachers cannot have masks ripped from their faces. Retail and restaurant workers should not have to deal with irate anti-maskers.
The result of all this dangerous nonsense? Nurses are leaving the profession, and lives are at risk.
“We’re almost to a tipping point,” Lucas said. “We’re already at a nursing shortage, it’s getting worse, and I don’t think we’ve seen anything yet. The harassment, the disbelief, the not doing what’s in the best interest of the community by getting a vaccine, is causing our nurses to rethink their profession.”
These shocking reports extend across the country: Someone recently punched a California teacher over masking rules. A Texas parent ripped a mask from a teacher’s face.
Restaurant workers and retail clerks have faced harassment for months, often for doing their jobs by asking patrons to wear required masks.
On Tuesday, an unmasked couple walked into a Northland convenience store and began berating an employee. “That stupid mask doesn’t do nothing for you,” a woman shouted at him. Her partner followed with a crack about not needing food stamps for their purchase.
The anti-mask belligerence fed by irresponsible politicians and spread by social media is reprehensible and wrong.
Screaming at the nurse who is trying to harder to save your life than you may have is too much to ask anyone to endure. Same goes for teachers, who are putting their own health at risk to educate your children.
The front-line workers who have worked so hard during the 18-month COVID crisis have also taken risks for the rest of us. They don’t earn a lot of money. They work strange hours. They have helped us all, and continue to do so.
If you can’t bring yourself to thank them, at least keep your spite to yourself.
This story was originally published August 26, 2021 at 5:00 AM.