When people make their personal decision about whether to get vaccinated, they are not thinking about the trauma their health-care providers have experienced since early last year. And I am not asking them to consider it. Professionalism mandates that physicians focus on the disease in front of them, not the behavior that may have contributed to it. When my colleagues diagnose chlamydia in a patient, their first priority is administering antibiotics, not delivering a lecture about asshole boyfriends. But once those antibiotics are prescribed, that same professionalism must include making sure that the patient knows how chlamydia is transmitted, and how to avoid ending up in this situation again.

That person may or may not listen to a doctor, and that’s understandable. However, the population-level rejection of COVID-19 vaccines is a different phenomenon—and one that’s much more personally threatening to my colleagues and me. By refusing the most effective intervention, people are risking not only their own life but the lives of many around them. That includes those who cannot get vaccinated—my children among them. Because of the choice that vaccine refusers are making, my job may again force me to avoid embracing my children.

“What makes me the maddest,” one of my doctor friends told me, “is that these people will reject science right until the second they need everything I have to keep them alive, and then they feel that they can come to our door and be entitled to that help and that hard work.” This friend is characterizing the inconsistency in the behavior she sees in people declining a vaccine but then demanding medical care based on the same science. That inconsistency feels, to her and to other dedicated medical professionals trying to survive this pandemic, very much like dishonesty.