Guest Commentary: Dealing with General Concerns About COVID Vaccination | Local guest opinions

As intensive care physicians practicing at Utah Valley Hospital in Provo, we treat the sickest of the sick. Over the past year, we’ve cared for hundreds of patients with severe COVID and protracted post-COVID symptoms. We have advocated measures to prevent this terrible disease from spreading. Because of this, we are motivated to alleviate suffering and save lives. Unfortunately, COVID is still a problem and it’s getting worse and worse.

For a short time there were no COVID patients in our intensive care unit (ICU). Now our cases are rising again, bringing in more seriously ill people every week. Since the beginning of June, new COVID cases in Utah have more than quadrupled from a rolling 7-day average of 208 to over 800. What happened? While the super-contagious Delta variant carries some blame, the recent surge in new COVID cases, hospital stays, intensive care admissions, and COVID deaths comes from the unvaccinated. Many of these patients are young and healthy. Our intensive care unit has had patients under 40 recently, some even in their 20s. As our count changes daily, one fact connects all of our patients: Over 95% of our COVID patients in the intensive care unit are unvaccinated. That’s tragic. Let’s address some of the concerns we’ve heard about vaccinations.

Many have concerns about the COVID vaccine and its side effects, which have been extensively studied through hundreds of millions of documented vaccinations. There are certainly some side effects: swollen lymph nodes, fever, blood clots, pericarditis, even extremely rare deaths. We recognize that the vaccine makes some people sick and very rarely very sick. However, the incidence of severe side effects is much worse with the actual COVID illness. And more people are dying. Much more.

Another common misconception is that COVID can be easily treated “if you just do a little research”. It’s true that most people who contract COVID don’t have a serious illness, so whatever you do may help. Large, well-planned and carefully controlled medical studies, however, have failed to demonstrate efficacy for popular so-called “remedies”. Severe COVID has no silver bullet, and despite the best medical care available, many with severe COVID still die or are left with chronic impairment. Our medical team in the intensive care unit will use any treatment that has been proven by good scientific studies to be effective, but for the most part the vaccine remains the prevention that works where the pound of healing fails.

Some patients or friends have told me to just trust the body’s natural immune system. Of course, we all have to do what we can to strengthen our immune system: exercise, a positive attitude, a healthy diet and adequate sleep help us fight diseases. However, the majority of the severe COVID patients we have cared for have had completely healthy immune systems. Some of the long-distance COVID patients we treated were competitive athletes. Some of the patients who died were young parents with no previous illnesses or positive attitudes. However, they still fell ill with complicated or fatal cases of COVID.

With the opening of our lives, without social distancing and new varieties, the unvaccinated sedentary ducks are prone to COVID and develop a serious illness with all its complications. In contrast, the vaccines stimulate our immune system to recognize and neutralize the virus. Vaccines give our immune system an early warning so that if we are exposed to COVID, we will get only mild illness or, more often, no illness at all. The vaccine is consistently over 90% effective in preventing illness, hospitalization, and COVID death. This protection includes the prevention of serious illnesses through the aggressive and highly contagious Delta variant.

The amazing statistics on COVID deaths are widespread, but we see them daily with individual patients and their families. We hate to see patients in the intensive care unit struggling to survive, sometimes succumbing to their illness, and know that their painful ordeal would have been avoided if they had received the vaccine. Both healthcare professionals and religious leaders encourage us to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. COVID is the problem; The solution is the vaccine. Please take the shot.