Hi,
I'm long time medical. I deal 100% with COVID on the front and back. I'm not political about it, I'll just give you some other perspectives.
Someone refusing the vaccine is no different than someone refusing the vaccines for anything offered. Including all your childhood vaccinations, or the yearly influenza that is constantly refused and has been around for a very long time. Pick any vaccine you want, and there are people who refuse them every single year. This logic applies to anything we know that is a preventable (including at risk behavior for life style and diet). So if you continue this logic of thinking that someone that refuses something that is optional, you eventually come to everyone refusing something and everyone having to then be responsible, 100%, for their medical care as a result of that refusal. So now what? You now have abandoned most people. COVID? Influenza? Polio? Measles/Mumps/Rubella? Chickenpox? Hepatitis A/B? Tetanus? Diphtheria? We do these vaccines here in the USA for the first 18 years of your life and are often required in most schools/universities. They too get refused or circumnavigated as nothing is 100% required and is your choice. But do we force anyone who refuses any of these to then be 100% liable for their medical care due to this refusal? No.
To force people to be liable for all their medical care with no help due to a refusal of a vaccine, for anything, is just emotional response to the idea of vaccines and the situation with COVID (or insert any pathogen here). But none of it is new. We've been doing this, just pick a different pathogen to target. So to answer fairly certainly to burden someone who refuses vaccine(s) in general with 100% of their medical care is not ethical.
Yes, there's tremendous evidence for the benefit of vaccines. And lots of evidence of issues with vaccines. But to make it required, or you suffer a massive penalty (100% health care liability in USA is total financial ruin; it is a death sentence, think of the long term results of this, destruction of your financial stability, wrecked credit, the resulting mental health, the desperation that it may push someone into; when you're liable and cannot or refuse to pay, you will recieve litigation and if awarded, your wages are garnished, it's not as simple as just not paying the bill). So then these people are forced to need even more assistance from the greater public economy. The end result? You got to smite someone for refusing a vaccine and destroyed the economy and indirectly other people who did take the vaccine along with it. No one wins.
This logic, or ethics if you will, also applies to anything else that is knowingly potentially preventable. That list is too long to even get into. But seat belts, texting while driving, or how about destructive life habits like alcoholism, smoking or poor diets full of salt and sugar? Smite them all? They could have chosen to do the right thing? It obviously doesn't work that way. And I'm willing to bet confidently that someone who thinks someone who refuses the COVID vaccine should be liable for their health care and not drain the system (which they will anyways despite that) probably has plenty of preventable disease states or will have them in a few more years and are completely hypocritical about it. Medically these very people should be following a dietician to ensure preventable diseases secondary to diet, preventable measures over a life time, are informed and followed and if they refuse, and they're at all overweight or pre-diabetic or at risk for heart disease, well, they're now medically liable for their lifetime for virtually everything. For everyone that wants to drop the hammer on someone who refuses the vaccines, they're probably unhealthy from diet or lifestyle and will be a burden to us on medicaid when they're older, and it was preventable, they could have informed themselves, and they are then held liable instead of being allowed to have medcaid? This is the exact same logic string as vaccination and COVID, but with even more evidence behind it. And this is precisely why we must have the idea of ethics in these things.
Despite all that, the concept of ethics in medicine is a duality. It went from subsidized by the government, to being legal to become for-profit as a business in the 1973 (Nixon). So like any business, whether you want to talk about ethics or how something comes to be, follow the money. Anyone who thinks a practioner in a health care facility follows some code or moral thing unforutnately has no clue. These health care facilities absolutely tell you what you will and will not handle, and have commities for it, because it's liability. Do you not treat someone? Depends on the liability. A physician doesn't make that choice on their own like some warzone battlefield situation in triage. The hospital administration and legal team does, with a little input from an ethics committee.
Very best,
