Thread by @mountain_goats

this, and the news about the vaccine refusal rate among southern California nurses, has me really down; there's the obvious "what is wrong with these people" response, but, for me, after that, there's the certainty that the failure is more general

https://twitter.com/lachlan/status/1344638999718211584

when I was in nursing school, we learned about vaccines, about infection control, about vectors and clean procedure and importantly about medical history, about what it was like before we knew about viruses, before the stunning advance of science in the 19th & 20th centuries

now, I'm a geek. I loved learning this stuff, I love to just be told "check it out here's a thing that's true that you didn't know." I begin from the proposition that I am ignorant, always, and I love to feel like I'm chipping away at that ignorance.

but even the class of nurses with whom I went through school, there were people who were only studying to the test, who didn't really care about the information -- just what it could get them in the short term: the license to practice.

but some of these nurses-in-training, you couldn't blame them -- divorcees just trying to get a job that can actually feed their kids, people for whom The Way Things Are was absolutely not shaking out the way they'd hoped. People getting ground down by life.

after you get your license and get out into the field, you work alongside many people who hated nursing school, who very intentionally didn't bother to retain anything they wouldn't need to actively use on the hospital floor. Most? No! Some? Yes.

Once, as a CNA during my nursing-school years, on a locked unit, I reported to my charge nurse that a patient had complained to me of command hallucinations, which were freaking them out; they'd been symptom-free for some time.

My nurse told me "watch this" and called the patient into the office,

....and preached the gospel of Jesus Christ to the patient for about twenty minutes. (I know. It was awful.) There's too many nurses for whom this doesn't seem like a bad idea,

who think "keep your personal beliefs out of your practice" is just something those eggheads in school told you,

and in my view while these people are of course doing wrong, the failure has to be seen as more broad, as systemic, and the question we have to ask is not "What is wrong with these people?" but "How have we failed them?"

I know for many of my friends "capitalism" is the end-all answer to this problem. It's certainly a big part of it! Who can afford to actually care about what they're being taught, when their workload is already crushing, when they're exhausted all the time?

But putting in the work of trying to move away from our suicidal market-obsessed way of living will not, in any near term, solve the problem of "I know what I know and you can't tell me otherwise"

I don't have any good answer here, this is a matter of profound despair for me, I loved being a nurse and I love my fellow nurses even when they're wrong, but I can't bear to think of the harm they're doing by persisting in their wrongness here.

Wherever the failure lies to educate everybody -- absolutely everybody -- about the basics of science, the stuff about which "my opinion" is not really part of the question --that's an area we need to triage, because failure to do so is, and will remain, catastrophic.