Emergency Physician Battling COVID Begs for Americans to Stop Getting Information from Fox News

Rob Davidson, an emergency physician in Michigan, wrote an op-ed for NBC News on Friday in which he describes how his job mitigating the dangers of COVID is made harder by his patients' reliance on Fox News for information. Calling it deceptive propaganda, Davidson concludes that the science should be dictating decisions, not cable news. He also places the onus on right-wing media instead of his patients, blaming the entities and not the people bearing the often deadly affects of the virus.

A patient walks in, struggling to breathe, complaining of pains and symptoms consistent with Covid-19. We recommend a test. Sometimes the patient declines, saying they don’t care whether they have a disease that not too long ago was the leading cause of death in the United States. When we suggest patients isolate themselves to prevent Covid-19 from spreading, sometimes they refuse. When we tell some patients and their family of a positive Covid-19 diagnosis, the response we get too many times is anger, outrage or denial. Just a few days ago, an older woman came into our emergency department, refusing to follow hospital policy to wear a mask and flatly refusing — like too many people in our community — to get vaccinated.

I don’t blame my patients for their refusal. What breaks my heart, as someone who took an oath to prevent harm, is that my patients choose to abandon the science and evidence that can save their lives. I do blame Fox News and other right-wing media outlets for poisoning the minds of millions of Americans with the deceptive propaganda they spray into living rooms 24/7.

Davidson joined CNN's New Day this morning and echoed some of the points in the piece.

Davidson describes most resistance to the vaccine comes via vague concerns that can't be communicated and often results in anger. All of this against a backdrop where 100 percent of new COVID deaths are from the unvaccinated.

Anyway, this is where we are several months into having free vaccines readily available to all. And with a new, deadlier variant spreading like wildfire.

You can bet the same concerns will be going out over the airwaves in three months and in six. Pretty depressing.