For Covid Nurses, No Point in Saying "I Told You So"
Unvaccinated Patients and the Exploitation of Care
“It’s not our job to care, it’s our job to provide care.”
This was the tough-love advice that a hospital nurse dispensed in a recent Reddit thread on caring for unvaccinated patients. The nurse was responding to another nurse’s post about struggling “not to care” about her anti-vax Covid patients. She’d written about wanting to say out loud, “I told you so”—to remind her patients that if you “fuck around” you “find out.”
But this nurse couldn’t avoid “caring about” in addition to “caring for.” She tried not to care about them, but she kept perceiving her patients’ stories as tragic rather than justly deserved. So she suffered. She identified with many of them: They were her age, with young kids. They came into the hospital sick but defiant; they ended up terrified and dying. She worked to save their lives and accompanied them through their dying as best she could. She thought about their children, who would lose parents too early. “There is nothing okay,” she wrote, “about watching kids turn into orphans because of their parents’ belief in lies fed to them through the media.”*
Many, many other nurses wrote in this thread about the pain they experience as they care for people who could have prevented their own suffering and deaths—as well as nurses’ exhaustion. These unvaccinated patients could have prevented other patients’ loss of access to care, as hospitals cope with surges, sometimes limiting elective procedures and rationing essential ones.
Last spring I wrote for Cognoscenti about the exploitation of nurses and other care-workers during the early stage of the pandemic. Back then it was a different sort of crisis, with the Trump administration spreading disinformation and downplaying the disease’s severity. Care workers faced a dearth of PPE (remember that?), and enormous patient burden. Now the U.S. has a highly effective vaccine, and nurses generally have enough physical protection. But the surges keep coming. And an entire political apparatus—conservative “news” outlets, social-media accounts, and Right-wing “leaders”—spreads misinformation about public health. The apparatus ensnares innocents, who catch Covid and die because they’ve believed the misinformation. The Right have developed this apparatus because it serves their political interests.
So people go on getting very sick from Covid, requiring heroic levels of care, and, once in the hospital, often dying—because they’ve refused to get vaccinated. The unvaccinated, according to the CDC, are ten times more likely to die from Covid than the vaccinated.
The U.S. leads the world in vaccine development. We could, with this enormous privilege, be seeing almost no deaths from Covid. (We could be providing more vaccines to poor countries.) We could be sparing our medical workers the physical and emotional exhaustion of Covid care. And yet a nurse saw fit to write on Reddit about trying not to care about her patients.
So I’m revisiting nurses’ exploitation. The nurse on Reddit who advised her colleagues “not to care but to provide care” had the intent of easing their anguish. But it’s impossible to make this separation entirely, between caring about and caring for. If nursing and other care work were a matter of just going through motions, robot-like—insert IV, turn body, perform intubation—nurses might go home at night without exhaustion.**
Human care consists of far more than robot-like physical tasks. It consists of moral conviction (a belief that people should respond to others’ suffering and need) and, often, emotional experience (empathy, compassion, sorrow, even love, in response to others’ suffering). It’s one thing to feel physically exhausted at the end of the working day. It’s another to feel that your very moral and emotional self has been taken advantage of.
This moral and emotional exploitation is, to me, one of the worst results of Covid misinformation. Of course another is the loss of life. But the nurse who struggles not to care is struggling with a conundrum: Who should suffer? Them, or me? It’s a conundrum she shouldn’t have to face, a conundrum being fostered by the American Right.
This is a feminist issue. Throughout history, and still, women have borne the greater moral and emotional burden of direct human care. It’s too easy to exploit this gendered obligation. Many nurses will tell you that they took up their profession because they wanted the rewards of helping to heal, of showing patients that they matter. They’ll tell you they enjoy caring for and about others. But when a system takes advantage of your moral and emotional self—that’s a system that needs resisting. •
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*About 90 percent of RNs are women, so I’ve gendered these anonymous nurses as female, even though they did not identify themselves as such. After all, this post is about female-gendered labor.
**Back in 1983, sociologist Arlie Hochschild coined the term “emotional labor” to mean the cultivation of feeling as a job requirement. She focused on female flight attendants and their employers’ requirements that they perform and internalize emotions that would please the passengers they served. Many women now use the phrase widely to mean any sense of emotional burden in their paid work and personal lives. In this broad sense, the nurses on the Reddit thread were talking about emotional labor. But in Hochschild’s more narrow sense, there’s a paradox: Nurses are not saying they’re being required to feel something; they’re trying not to feel. The gendered obligation to feel and respond, of course, still shapes the burden.