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COVID-19 vaccine conspiracy theories are shaking things up again, this time regarding the blood supply. An alternate blood donation infrastructure is growing. (If you don’t want to read the vaccine-skeptical take from TGP, here’s the Vice article on SafeBlood Donation they were reporting on.)
This comes after the release of the Suddenly Died documentary blaming the vaccine for the surge in heart attacks, including really odd blood clots.
I have given blood for twenty years and do not plan to stop. I don’t give through the Red Cross but rather through Vitalent, formerly United Blood Services. I am not vaccinated for COVID-19, and will continue to vehemently, vociferously, and assiduously avoid those injections, on both medical and religious grounds (though my reasoning is different than one might expect). I don’t plan to switch my donations to SafeBlood unless they can assure me it won’t be wasted, by my definitions of wasted.
All of this may seem to be a fascinating new front in the Culture War, but it’s actually an attempt to recapture territory: the denial of organ transplants to COVID-vaccine refusers.
Heart attacks have indeed gone up in recent years, but there are at least two major potential factors besides the vaccine:
COVID itself
deferral of care due to the burdening of health system (which in itself might have many overlapping explanations, including COVID, secondary effects of COVID like the economic dip, undue fear of COVID, the related measures like lockdowns etc.)
These would seem particularly relevant considering that apparently the rise of excess heart disease began already in 2020, ie. before mass vaccinations began.
It's hard for me to take the vaccine/heart attack theorists completely seriously if they just wave these explanations away ("It can't be COVID because COVID was actually harmless!"), particularly considering that many of them did speak a lot about the problems of deferral of care such as heart attacks caused by lack of check-ups before the vaccines became the main topic of discussion and then immediately pivoted to blaming heart attacks on vaccines alone.
I think you mean forced closure of the healthcare system. At least in the US, hospital bed occupancy was consistently lower throughout Covid than before it. Let’s not conflate the deliberate policy choice to deprive people with non-Covid health problems of necessary healthcare with mere bad luck or supply not meeting demand.
The things that will count as "burden" here mean health care decisions usually taken to avoid the sort of hospital bed occupancy people might see, ie. reorganizing care to move resources from other things to COVID stuff, tightening triage criteria etc. The fact that they successfully do that to avoid obvious, immediate occupancy overflow doesn't mean that COVID hasn't affected the general health care system sustainability in other ways.
I believe that the health care system was burdened by overtly tight measures, yes, but also by COVID itself. Both played a role.
Avoiding obvious, immediate occupancy overflow is one thing, consistently holding occupancy below normal levels is quite another.
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