Vaccinate the vulnerable
Cancer treatments put patients on COVID front line
Iam a stage IV lung cancer patient in active treatment for my disease. I get treated in Boston, though I live in upstate New York. Gov. Andrew Cuomo has yet to articulate a timeframe when I will be eligible for a COVID -19 vaccination. I am too young — 46 — and too sick to be a health care worker, educator, or police officer. Last Sunday, I was denied access to the vaccine, despite the fact that the SUNY Albany campus had 60 no-shows as of 3:30 p.m. It seems Cuomo feels it is more important to vaccinate my healthy, college professor husband or the 20-something year old woman behind him in line than it was to vaccinate a terminally ill woman missing half of her left lung.
I fall into a dangerous medical loophole in the governor’s plan. It’s a loophole that omitted people with underlying health conditions, from those with chronic kidney disease, heart problems and weakened immune systems to cancer patients like myself. That is, the very people we’ve been told are most at risk.
Numerous scientific studies indicate that if we were to contract COVID -19, lung cancer patients such as myself have a 29 percent chance of dying from the virus. Similar science suggests that if I contract the virus, I have a 65 percent chance of requiring hospitalization. That death rate is double that of the 80-plus-year-old age group.
If we are following the science and want to keep people out of hospitals and morgues, then cancer patients like me ought to be prioritized in the governor’s plan regardless of our working status or age. But we are not.
Active cancer treatment requires that a patient be at the hospital and in and out of doctors’ offices all the time. That will put me and people like me right on the front line in the war against COVID -19. Only, unlike virtually everyone affiliated with the hospital, I won’t have the benefit of protection from the virus, even when my risk of suffering a severe consequence of the virus is much, much higher than theirs.
My treating hospital, Massachusetts General, recently announced that it was expanding its internal vaccination program to include all of its remote and virtual workers in addition to its on-site, patient-facing medical staff, similar to what New York has done.
That means that I am still being denied access to the vaccine, despite my risk, even as hospital workers who are working from the safety of home can now get the injection to protect them from COVID -19. Let’s be clear: Cuomo has decided that it is more important for a young, healthy, medical biller to be able to continue to bill my insurance company for my likely hospitalization than it is to eliminate my need to go into the hospital in the first place. According to the state’s own statistics, 46 percent of New York’s adult population has priority over me.
This seriously compromises my faith in the medical and political establishment.
The Hippocratic Oath asks doctors to pledge: “First, do no harm.”
The system that Cuomo and the medical industry have set up for cancer patients looks more hypocritical than Hippocratic. This is not health care. It is the Hunger Games. We are six weeks into the vaccine rollout, and I’m lower in priority that I was several weeks ago.
And, make no mistake about it, people are dying and will continue to die because of the bad choices and neglect involved here.
The risks are so substantial for certain segments of the community, including the lung cancer community, that withholding a vaccine is nearly equivalent to withholding lifesaving cancer therapies. Perhaps we can survive and hold out for a few more months, perhaps not. The important thing, according to the vaccine rollout decision makers, is that none of the millions in the “essential” professions miss work.
COVID -19 hasn’t dominated the headlines because it is a bad stomach bug. It’s a big deal because it sends 12 percent of people who get it into the hospital and kills somewhere around 1 percent of those who contract it. Ten months in, we know the physical conditions of the people landing in the hospital. Particularly when infection rates are high and the vaccine is scarce, it makes sense to target those individuals. To do otherwise is to pander to politics rather than science.
If we are following the science and want to keep people out of hospitals and morgues, then cancer patients like me ought to be prioritized in the governor’s plan regardless of our working status or age. But we are not.