I've seen this photo floating around on the internet and popping up in my Facebook timeline. It's the kind of thing anti-vaxxers are posting and pointing to as a proof/argument that vaccines are not necessary and should be a personal choice. I'd like to take a critical look at this photo and its claims, and lay out the case for why this photo is neither proof of nor argument for anything.
In the photo, we see a woman in scrubs holding a sign that says,
573 DAYS FACE TO FACE WITH COVID PATIENTS WHILE UNVACCINATED
NEVER GOT COVID
I HAVE AN IMMUNE SYSTEM
DON'T MANDATE MY CHOICES!
I was unable to find a source for this photo or any reliable information about it. We don't know this woman's name or where she works or what her professional role or credentials are; therefore there's no way to verify that anything on her placard is true, or that the text on it hasn't been photoshopped. She's wearing scrubs, but that doesn't mean she's a medical professional. She might be someone who simply dressed up in scrubs to create an anti-vax meme. She might be a veterinary assistant. She might be some sort of medical professional, but not one that works directly with COVID patients. After all, she doesn't claim she provides medical care for COVID patients, only that she's "face to face" with them. She might a hospital employee who does intake, and only sees COVID patients "face to face" from behind a plexiglass shield and in full PPE, in which case the shield and PPE would have protected her, not her immune system.
Even is she is a bona fide healthcare worker who works directly with COVID patients, we can't be sure she never got COVID. Was she tested for it? How often was she tested for it? Even if she never actually became ill, unless she is tested very regularly, it could be that she got it, remained asymptomatic, and infected others without knowing it.
Then there's the claim that she's been face to face with COVID patients for "573 days". Dating back from today, August 18th, 2021, 573 days ago was January 23, 2020. COVID existed at that time, but the pandemic wasn't declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization until March 11, 2020, and there weren't that many known cases in late January 2020. Where does this woman work that she has been "face to face" with COVID patients ever single day since January 23, 2020, or even before that, since this photo was posted earlier than today? And is she really claiming that she's never taken a single day off in 573 days? That claim, at least, is almost certainly not true, so we know this woman lied about, or at least exaggerated, one of her claims, and if she lied about or exaggerated that claim, what else might she have lied about or exaggerated?
Even if everything this woman's sign says is true, even if she is someone who has been face to face with COVID patients every single day since before the pandemic really began, and has been tested regularly and has test results proving that she never got COVID, her experience is still not proof that vaccines are not necessary. She is one person. One person who has had the extraordinary luck to avoid infection without being vaccinated does not constitute proof that vaccinations are unnecessary. We need to look at the bigger picture, at the infection rate among the people who are at risk for COVID19.
Let's look at how it's affecting health care workers. According to the Ontario Hospital Association, there have been 23,772 health sector workers infected with COVID19 in Ontario alone to date. I've been unable to find up-to-date numbers on how many Ontarian or Canadian health care workers have died of COVID19 to date, but according to the Canadian Institute for Health, as of February 25, 2021, 24 Canadian health workers had died of COVID19. Those 24 workers were unlikely to have been vaccinated by February 2021, so their immune systems and even their PPE didn't protect them, just as they haven't protected the countless number of healthcare workers who would have become infected and died worldwide. The experience of one unvaccinated healthcare worker who escaped infection (and again, we don't know if she is a healthcare worker, or actually had contact with COVID patients, or wasn't infected) does not prove that vaccines aren't necessary when we know for a fact that so many, many unvaccinated health care workers have become infected and even died of COVID worldwide.
This woman is one person whose claims cannot be verified, and it would be foolish of anyone to rely on her opinion. If you had cancer, and you visited 99 actual doctors who gave you nearly identical advice about how your cancer should be treated, and then you saw a Facebook photo meme of someone claiming to be a doctor holding a sign with advice on how to treat cancer that's completely at odds with what the 99 doctors say, would you follow the advice on the sign written by someone who may not even be a doctor and whose advice may not even have been tested on anyone, or would you follow the medical advice from actual doctors who have been known to successfully treat cancer patients?
The science, the statistics, are clear. Everyone who can be vaccinated should be, and healthcare workers, who are especially high risk, should be vaccinated or they should find something else to do for a living. They have no right to risk other people's lives out of ignorance and carelessness, and frankly, I would never want medical care from anyone who is supposedly medically trained and experienced and is still so pig-headed, so ignorant, and so irresponsible as to deny accepted science and objective reality regarding vaccines. If this woman is indeed any kind of healthcare worker, and this message is actually one she intended to send and not photoshopped, I hope she gets fired for having disseminated dangerous misinformation, as what she is doing is a violation of professional medical ethics.
