Intensive care, Covid
If you smoke 50 cigarettes a day and get cancer, I want you to be cured.
If you throw yourself off the first floor to shoot a video for Tik Tok you are a jerk, but if you survive I want you to get back on your feet with free, quality care.
I’m not good, I just see a right and with rights it works like this; if it is a right, an identity card is not requested, simply if a person of the human race has a medical need, he or she has the right to be treated.
Let’s take a step back, because this is not everyone’s thinking, and even if the idea was initially born as a social provocation, somewhere it is becoming reality. From 8 December Singapore will no longer pay medical bills to people “not vaccinated by choice” against Covid. In Germany, in Thuringia – the state of central-eastern Germany – President Bodo Ramelow said: “We will not be able to guarantee anyone who comes to the hospital without the protection of the vaccine, which can be treated here”. It is not yet law, but in the meantime the president has thrown away the idea, in short, the possibility of not treating people with Covid who have chosen not to get vaccinated in public hospitals has become a topic of debate even outside the comments on social networks.
Did you understand what this means?
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I’ll explain it better: the costs of hospitalization for people who get sick with Covid, would be borne by the sick person. The goal is to weigh less on the national health system and push people to get vaccinated, thus reducing the number of hospitalizations, the costs for the State, and freeing up places for other patients suffering from other pathologies.
Germany is in full fourth wave, and with only 70% of the vaccinated. Winter has just begun and they are scared, simply and fucking scared.
In Singapore even more. The health minister said: “Unvaccinated people make up a significant majority of those who need to be admitted to intensive care and contribute disproportionately to the burden on our health system.”
Is it right not to pay the costs of hospitalization for those who have deliberately decided not to get vaccinated? I don’t think so.
Free and quality care must be a right, and rights belong to everyone, otherwise they are a privilege. Rights are not rewarded “if you behave well then you can get this and that”. Rights are such when they are independent of merit.
You can be Riina, or the one who stole my car, but the rights must also be yours, this is the essential difference between a democracy and something that is not fully.
I say it more clearly: if you do not get vaccinated against Covid and shout in the square “Covid does not exist” I want you to be treated anyway.
If you threaten me during the “No green pass” parade in Milan, I want you to be treated equally, hoping that you do not get sick, but if it happens – and by not vaccinating you have a better chance – I would like you to be treated with the same quality and gratuitousness that I expect for me, who instead got vaccinated and believe in the civil action of mass immunization .
Let me be clear: if you choose not to get vaccinated, you and I will continue to fight, but if you get sick I want you to receive the best treatment, because I don’t think a foolish idea can take away your right.
It is the Hippocratic oath, it is the law of the sea for those who drown, it is Gino Strada who welcomed the wounded from all sides to the war in hospitals.
I hope that Singapore will reconsider, and that in Germany and no other European state they will follow President Ramelow’s idea.
“There can be no human society without right” (Karl Popper)
