But the story is different on our intensive care unit. Here, the patient population consists of a few vulnerable people with severe underlying health problems and a majority of fit, healthy, younger people unvaccinated by choice. Watching the mix of patients coming in with Covid, it feels to me like hardly anybody has been vaccinated nowadays; of course, this is because the people that have been vaccinated are getting on with their lives at home. If everyone got vaccinated, hospitals would be under much less pressure; this is beyond debate. Your wait for your clinic appointment/operation/diagnostic test/A&E department would be shorter. Your ambulance would arrive sooner. Reports of the pressure on the NHS are not exaggerated, I promise you.
Furthermore, we have recently rolled out a new medication for patients without antibodies against Covid. It costs about £2,000 a treatment and is subject to a rigorous and time-consuming approval process for every case we treat. Guess which patients don’t have these antibodies (spoiler: it’s not the ones who have been vaccinated).
Most of the resources that we are devoting to Covid in hospital are now being spent on the unvaccinated.
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