Hundreds of doctors issue plea to 4-county Sacramento region: Please get COVID-19 vaccine
Hundreds of doctors published an urgent plea to residents of the four-county Sacramento region on Wednesday, pleading with them to get vaccinated against COVID-19 and saying “we are tired of the suffering, pain and death.”
“Please get vaccinated. We ask this from the bottom of our hearts,” the doctors state in the letter. “As your physicians, and as the people with whom you have worked, played, laughed and cried, we must admit we are tired.
“We will keep working, of course. But we are tired. We are tired of the suffering, pain, and death that can be avoided by getting vaccinated.”
Dr. Vanessa Walker, a pulmonologist and critical-care doctor who signed the letter, said she signed death certificates for two COVID-19 patients at the start of her shift Wednesday morning and then had two other patients die from it that same day.
Walker sits on the board of the Sierra Sacramento Valley Medical Society, the organization of doctors who wrote the letter to the community. During a meeting last week with colleagues and staff in the organization, she shared her heartbreak over one of her recent patients, a 40-year-old single mother of three teenage children.
Leaving the hospital after her shift, Walker said she had a feeling that the woman would not last the day. When she returned to the hospital, she learned her patient had died. The woman had no underlying conditions, Walker said, but she had not been vaccinated.
There is “untold grief like we’ve never experienced,” Walker said, and it is demoralizing and senseless to watch otherwise healthy young people, in the prime of their lives, die from a disease that could have been prevented.
Nine out of 10 people who are now ending up in hospitals with COVID-19 have not been vaccinated, said Dr. Carol Burch, a primary care physician who leads the society. She and her colleagues decided to make an appeal to the community after learning that doctors in rural Humboldt County had done so.
Many people arrive to hospitals terribly ill with the disease and, once diagnosed, they ask to be vaccinated, Walker said. She and her colleagues have to explain that it is a preventive measure and that it will not help once a person is infected with the coronavirus.
Burch and Walker said that medical teams are also finding that many people seeking treatment staunchly believe inaccurate information that has been shared in social media, on websites or by word of mouth.
“I’ve heard multiple doctors tell me about patients yelling at them that there is no such thing as COVID, and that’s not what they’re dying from,” Burch said. “It’s very hard on our providers that want to give compassionate care.”
Walker said she’s had many patients and their relatives demand to be treated with ivermectin, a drug given to cattle to prevent parasites or with homeopathic remedies or other treatments that have never been shown to be effective against COVID-19.
“As people have had more access to information, the physicians aren’t the only place they have to go to to get information, which is good,” Walker said. “We want our patients to be empowered, but they still need somebody to help them sift through things.”
She added: “When we go to medical school, we don’t just learn about medicine. We also learn how to research, we learn how to identify bias in literature, we learn how to really truly critically appraise information. It’s a skill that we gain over time. It’s not just something that you can get sitting in front of Google for five minutes.”
Walker said she and other doctors are accustomed to working 60-hour weeks, but they are now working 80- or 100-hour weeks as they try to address the current surge in COVID-19 patients.
“I assure everybody that’s reading this or listening, if I had something that would stop it, I would get it,” Walker said to those who think the medical community is withholding some cure. “I simply don’t have anything.”
Members of the society had been mulling over what they could do to motivate patients to get vaccinated, Walker said, and they hit upon the idea of the letter and sent it out to doctors on Friday, seeking signatures.
More than 700 doctors quickly asked the society’s staff to add their names, said Aileen Wetzel, the executive director of the group, and more are signing on daily as they find the letter in their electronic mailboxes.
The physicians emphasized in their letter that they had been immunized themselves, so they are not asking people to do anything they have not done.
“We have studied the data, and we have seen the benefits of the vaccination with our own eyes,” the doctors said. “The vaccines are well-tested, very safe, and highly effective. Yes, masking must continue, especially with the highly contagious Delta variant. But nothing is as important as being vaccinated.”
The medical society noted in a separate news release that COVID-19 had killed at least 2,600 people in El Dorado, Placer, Sacramento and Yolo counties and had sickened nearly 200,000 residents in the capital region.
To schedule a vaccination, go to myturn.ca.gov, or call your doctor or pharmacist to find a location.
