Singer opens his piece by describing a case of a patient at a hospital in rural Iowa who was admitted for sepsis and became acutely ill, requiring surgery at a larger hospital, but was unable to be transferred in time to save his life due to a lack of spare beds due to the large number of Covid patients.
Singer then asks, if people who could be vaccinated voluntarily but choose not to, why should they not bear the consequences of their decision. As usual, Singer lays out his case clearly and precisely, as befits a professional philosopher. It is, however, the sort of proposition that, as any politician would no, would not survive the first time any government tried to implement it.
The family of Dale Weeks, who died last month at the age of 78, would disagree. Weeks was a patient at a small hospital in rural Iowa, being treated for sepsis. The hospital sought to transfer him to a larger hospital where he could have surgery, but a surge in COVID-19 patients, almost all of them unvaccinated, meant that there were no spare beds. It took 15 days for Weeks to obtain a transfer, and by then, it was too late.
Weeks became another of the many indirect victims of COVID-19 – people who never had the virus, but died because others who did were taking up scarce health-care resources, especially beds in intensive care units. His daughter said: “The thing that bothers me the most is people’s selfish decision not to get vaccinated and the failure to see how this affects a greater group of people. That’s the part that’s really difficult to swallow.”