The amount of confirmed corona cases is rising again, and the hospitals are likely to fill up again with (unvaccinated) covid patients. At Rijnmond, Martin Buijsen, Professor of Health Law at Erasmus School of Law, stresses that everyone deserves healthcare. “When someone gets sick or injured, they should always receive medical help, despite the cause of the symptoms. Even when the given reasoning makes that it could be his or her own fault ending up in this situation. However, if someone is unvaccinated without a proper reason, there is a moral blame to be made”, says Buijsen.
According to Buijsen, some vaccinated people feel like their right to regular care will be denied because the hospitals are likely to be flooded with (unvaccinated) covid patients again. He understands their frustrations, mainly because unvaccinated people are refusing free preventive care. Meanwhile, they are still entitled to hospital treatment against the coronavirus. “Of course, that is not consistent”, says Buijsen.
Still, it remains essential to treat every ill person because of the gilded rule in medicine, according to Buijsen: “those who require the most urgent care, are eligible first. This rule also applies to people who are not vaccinated and suffer from the coronavirus because the right to health care is a fundamental human right.”
Moral blame
Buijsen thinks that unvaccinated people are morally to blame if there is no good reason for not getting vaccinated. “When someone refuses to get vaccinated and therefore occupies a hospital bed, this person should be made aware of the fact that they occupy a bed that could be used for the urgent care of a vaccinated person. If you ask me, this cannot be stressed enough”, says the Professor of Health Law at the Erasmus University Rotterdam.
New measures for unvaccinated people are unworkable
According to Buijsen, creating new measures for the unvaccinated is not feasible. Local lockdowns will not work: “in the Bible belt, for example, this might work, but in a big city like Rotterdam, there are still a lot of unvaccinated people around. In that case, such a measure would not work. In addition, people can travel, so local measures would fail because people are mobile.”
Buijsen pleas for positive incentives to get vaccinated instead of searching for new coercive measures. No longer offering free covid-tests would probably help increase the vaccination coverage, for example.
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Read the entire article by Rijnmond here (in Dutch).