Once upon a time there was a pandemic, despite what the “deniers” and conspiracy theorists say. This rare disease outbreak shook every corner of the globe, yet brought out the best in people, people who put their lives on the line to care for the sick and dying.
But to this day, I still hear and read about folks who are convinced the COVID-19 pandemic was blown out of proportion and vaccines were, and still are, dangerous and unnecessary.
Even worse, we have at the helm of the Department of Health and Human Services an ardent anti-vaxxer himself.
Let’s remind ourselves of past statistics: From early 2020 to 2024 over 7 million died from COVID-19 worldwide, over 1.2 million in the United States. At the pandemic’s peak, the number of deaths exceeded 20,000 per week in the U.S. alone.
The pandemic crippled health systems worldwide, massively depleted resources, and exposed workers on the frontlines to tremendous risk of catching and dying from the disease. Hospitals worldwide were overflowing with COVID-19 patients, many on ventilators, many of whom died. Our three local hospitals were completely full and turned away patients in the ERs; they could not receive admissions or transfers even for non-COVID serious illnesses.
This was reality, not fiction.
As a testament to this, I’ll give a personal example: While on-call, the transfer center from one of our hospitals called me about a patient with a deep neck abscess at a small ER 200 miles away. This type of infection can progress and obstruct the airway, spread towards the brain or chest, or cause sepsis. These patients must be admitted and often need surgery. There was no ENT in their location; they had called over 20 other hospitals in Oregon, Washington, and California, all of which were full. Our hospital also could not take the transfer but was the first to place her on a “waiting list.” I offered to admit her should space open up; in other words, someone either had to be discharged or die. But our ERs were overflowing with patients waiting for a hospital bed. That patient never got transferred, at least while I was on-call. I hope someone else was able to accept her, otherwise she risked dying of that infection. That’s how bad the pandemic was.
By the very nature of our profession, ENT doctors are intimately close to a patient’s face and at high risk for contagion. I still treated patients in the hospital or ER, such as tonsil or deep neck abscesses and unrelenting nosebleeds, some of whom had COVID-19. Controlling nosebleeds in a COVID-19 patient proved challenging; those few not on a ventilator required me to remove their oxygen mask, perform as much as possible in the nose, and quickly replace the mask since oxygen saturations dropped quickly, and repeat the process until I could identify the bleeding site and control it. The patient might cough or sneeze during these encounters, spraying blood and secretions and virus towards my face (of course, masked and goggled).
As doctors, we couldn’t simply refuse to see a COVID-19 patient; we swore an oath to care for the sick. Though not directly stated in the Hippocratic Oath, many doctors find implicit is our duty to the patient despite risks to ourselves. Once the COVID-19 vaccines were available, health care workers were the first to receive them and most of us readily did.
Despite the claims of anti-vaxxers, the vaccine saved lives, did not create a danger to its recipients, and allowed us all to continue taking care of patients.
It was only through herd immunity, with the large mass of the world’s population being vaccinated, that rendered the disease much less virulent and far less deadly. The deniers ignored all the science and proven information readily available—from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the numerous other health and medical organizations—believing instead that we were complicit in some elaborate conspiracy to spread harmful vaccines or we over-exaggerated the disease’s impact. These deniers also claim vaccines for other diseases (already proven highly effective and safe) are also harmful and unnecessary.
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In 1897, a New York newspaper called The Sun published an editorial in response to a letter from 8-year-old Virginia O’Hare, who asked if Santa Claus was real. She was troubled that her “little friends” were Santa-deniers, claiming the jolly old elf didn’t exist. Her father (a surgeon, ironically) could not provide a satisfactory answer, and so she wrote to the paper, for “If you see it in The Sun it’s so.”
In a brilliant piece of writing, the editor, Francis Pharcellus Church, replied in The Sun that “Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist,” and prefaced this by saying the unbelievers “have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age.”
Though not literally true, the editorial nevertheless struck home with its readers. Its enduring message was inspirational and unifying, and it spoke to our better natures. It became so popular, it was re-published by other newspapers and later other media outlets for generations, and has endured long after The Sun closed in 1950.
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Contrast this to our current day and age, where easy access to social media allows anyone to promote untruths and dangerous misinformation that inspires harmful behavior. These “influencers” ridicule and condemn proven and long-established therapies, and their opinions, not based on fact, only serve to drive a wedge between the medical community and patients.
To all those innocent Virginias out there: Yes, there was a pandemic that brought out the best in people; yes, vaccines saved countless lives; and yes, there is hope for humanity despite what the conspiracy theorists and false prophets say. And I offer myself—along with the millions of health care workers around the globe who risked contagion and death—as an eyewitness to that awful period in our history, and as a vaccine recipient still alive and in great health.
Randall S. Fong is an otolaryngologist.
