The Sunday Times November 28, 2021 11
NEWS
825
Number of Covid patients
in intensive care in EnglandI suppress a howl of disbelief. She
would rather die than have a jab
She is young, ashen and
fighting for her life. All I can
offer is morphine.
Chemotherapy has sent her
blood count crashing. The
drugs that could cure her
breast cancer are so
toxic that any infection
could be fatal. As she
flinches from the pain
of taking a breath, her
raw, inflamed lung is
scraping against the
wall of her chest,
making each gasp an
ordeal. Somewhere at
home, two little girls and
their distraught father sit
and wait in a house that
gapes with the absence of
their mummy.
“I need to be with them,”
she rasps. “How soon?”
Although Ellen, as I’ll call
her, gulps oxygen from the
pipe on the wall, her
pneumonia prevents her
talking in sentences. I focus
on her pain relief, vital to
enable proper breathing,
which allows me to suppress
my private howl of disbelief.
Ellen, in her mid-thirties
and with everything to live
for, trusts her doctors to
administer an antibiotic so
potent that it is nicknamed
Domestos; a painkiller ten
times stronger than opium;and chemotherapy literally
designed to kill living human
cells. Yet she will not have a
Covid vaccine. Her refusal
makes me want to weep. The
only thing worse than a
young person’s death is one
that easily could have been
avoided. Thankfully, on this
occasion Ellen’s chest
infection is not Covid. But
what about the next, and the
one after that?
Does she not know how
many unvaccinated young
men and women with intact
immune systems are
suffocating to death in the
intensive care unit one floor
above her? How
dumbfounded they were to
discover that they were, after
all, vulnerable to Covid? How
they beg, sometimes,
breaking all our hearts, to be
vaccinated? How they plead
for the protection they hope a
jab might bring — when it is
far too late?
Ellen, I want to plead, how
can you not choose life? For
your children, for yourself,
please be jabbed. I say
nothing. Now is not the time.
But I wonder how we have
arrived here, in this madness:
a place where intelligent men
and women would rather
catch a deadly infectious
disease than accept a vaccine.
In my NHS trust, we onceagain have entire wards
devoted to treating Covid
patients, in addition to those
on mechanical ventilation in
ICU. We are giving our all to
care for our share of the
8,000 patients in UK
hospitals with Covid. These
patients quietly continue to
die at a rate of about 1,000 a
week. The public can almost
pretend they are not there.
But we can’t.
Colleagues have seen
children orphaned when first
an unvaccinated mother and
then an unvaccinated father
succumb to Covid. Pregnant,
intubated women have died
in intensive care shortly after
their babies were delivered
by emergency caesarean.
Of the Covid patients in
intensive care nearly 75 per
cent, according to the latest
data, have chosen not to be
vaccinated. As Professor
Andrew Pollard, director of
the Oxford Vaccine Group,
put it last week: “This
ongoing horror, which is
taking place across ICUs in
Britain, is largely restricted to
unvaccinated people.”
Individual decisions to
forgo vaccination are having
inevitable consequences. In
my NHS trust, we are on
permanent black alert. We
have converted every
conceivable spare space —Dr Rachel Clarkeunvaccinated people in their seventies,
for example, are nearly four times higher
than among those who have had two
injections. Death rates among those in
their fifties are nearly six times higher
among the unvaccinated than the dou-
ble-jabbed.
Someone aged 40 to 49 who is unvacci-
nated is as likely to be admitted to hospi-
tal with Covid as a vaccinated 70 to
79-year-old. Someone in their fifties who
has shunned their jabs has the risk of
someone in their eighties with two doses.
Many people have been slow to take up
the offer of the vaccine, but they are still
arriving at centres in dribs and drabs.
Last month 270,000 adults had their
first Covid vaccine, many months after
the programme first opened. Most were
young, but not all: 30,000 were over 50.
Nearly a year since vaccination was
approved for their age group, no fewer
than 2,445 over-80s had their first dose.
Although take-up among over-80s is
high, at about 96 per cent, about 128,
are yet to come forward.
Linda Bauld, professor of public health
at Edinburgh University, said: “I don’t
think it’s well enough understood that
vaccination is an ‘evergreen offer’.”
Powis said: “Getting the jab makes a
huge difference and will reduce the
chance of hospitalisation and death
this winter. The public can play a
huge role to help us.”TOM BARNES FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINECORONAVIRUS
Intensive care beds filled with
unvaccinated Covid patients
Health chief ’s renewed inoculation plea
amid fears for those with other illnesses
discharge lounges, offices,
oversized broom cupboards
— into extra wards. There is
no spare capacity.
The maths is brutal. One
in, one out. Unless this
patient leaves, that one
cannot enter. The ambulance
queue snakes around A&E,
with paramedics sometimes
spending an entire 12-hour
shift stuck on the hospital
forecourt, unable to drop off
their patient. People are
dying of heart attacks and
strokes in stationary
ambulances.
I can understand the anger
some clinicians feel towards
the unvaccinated. I do not
share it, however. The
bedrock of good medicine is
treating your patient simply
as a human being in need.
With our unvaccinated
Covid patients, I feel more
than anything desolate,
heartbroken.I know they are
here, in part, because a
torrent of disinformation,
spewed out on social media,
has made them too scared to
have the vaccine.
My rage is reserved for the
charlatans who use their
platforms to sow mistruths.
These people are liars and
cynics with blood on their
hands.
Rachel Clarke is an NHS
palliative care doctorHundreds of intensive care beds that
could be used for life-saving surgery are
instead occupied by unvaccinated Covid
patients, one of NHS England’s top offi-
cials has said.
On Friday morning 825 out of 3,
patients in intensive care beds across
England had Covid. Most remained
unvaccinated.
Professor Stephen Powis, the national
medical director of NHS England, said:
“The vaccine is safe, effective and proven
to reduce deaths, hospitalisations and
infections and, in fact, data shows that
the overwhelming majority of people
admitted to intensive care with Covid are
not fully vaccinated.
“Since July one in four critical beds
have been consistently occupied by a
Covid patient, with the latest statistics
available showing three quarters of them
are unvaccinated. These are beds that
would have historically been used to pro-
vide life-saving surgeries for the most
seriously ill patients.”
While the vaccine is not perfect, and
more than 5,000 people have required
hospital treatment for Covid in the past
month despite having received both
doses, the odds are overwhelmingly in
favour of those who have had jabs.
Emergency admission rates amongBen Spencer
and Tom Calver37%
Proportion of 12-15 year olds
who have been vaccinated