Like hopefully most of you reading this post, Rachel Maddow is frustrated by and worried about people who refuse to get vaccinated. And on Wednesday’s episode of her MSNBC show, she became visibly upset about all the needless deaths that are a direct result of that selfishness.
The topic at hand was the alarming news that hospitalizations for COVID-19 are approaching levels not seen since the worst days of 2020. But the problem isn’t distributed evenly. It primarily is a problem in states whose elected officials oppose even mild anti-COVID measures. For example, in Montana and virtually the entire South, hospitals in many places have been forced to ration care due to beds being taken up by unvaccinated people who contracted COVID-19. In Idaho, the situation is so bad that every single hospital in the state has literally run out of ICU beds. And Alaska has been forced to activate “crisis standards” of care because its hospital system is overwhelmed.
As Maddow pointed out on Thursday, this doesn’t just affect people who chose not to receive a free vaccine. The excess mortality rate in the U.S. total has spiked dramatically, thanks to the fact that anti-vaccine fanatics who predictably catch COVID-19 are hogging hospital space and preventing other people from getting medical help.
“To put it in blunt terms, the ‘personal decision’ of someone in Alaska to not get vaccinated right now ultimately results in someone else dying in Anchorage, because that person can’t get the dialysis treatment that would save their life, that they’d otherwise be able to get,” Maddow said. “If it weren’t for those hospitals otherwise being overwhelmed by people who are sick specifically, and only because they chose not to get the shot to protect them from COVID.”
Maddow then proceeded to dismantle the cruel nonsense anti-vaxxers use to justify their decisions. “You keep hearing this mantra on the right, even from people who ought to know better in the conservative media, that it’s a ‘personal decision,’ that it only affects you, that it doesn’t affect people who aren’t vaccinated,” she said. “Well, tell that to the family of the person who just died.”
“And the standards that allowed that death to happen are now in place statewide in every hospital in Alaska, and every hospital in Idaho, and they’re going on in other individual hospitals in other states now too,” Maddow continued.
“That is because people are not getting vaccinated. Your decision whether or not to get vaccinated can be a life or death determining factor for somebody else who did get vaccinated, but gets in a car wreck, or needs dialysis, or needs a heart catheterization procedure, something that they won’t be able to get because of all the unvaccinated people filling up the hospitals,” Maddow continued.
“This is not complicated math. And it is not — it may be a ‘personal decision,’ but it is a decision that has consequences way beyond your personal, corporeal self,” Maddow said, becoming visibly upset.
“Forgive me, I’m sorry,” she said, adding that this problem is of “national significance, it needs a lot more attention than it’s getting, and it should affect all of our thinking about how we are taking care of ourselves and our loved ones.”
It’s not the first time Maddow has touched on this issue. She disclosed last fall the terror she experienced when her partner almost died after contracting COVID-19.
Watch the clip below.