One of the hallmarks of totalitarian states is their creation of archetypes to teach the masses proper behavior. The Soviets created Pavlik Morozov, a fictitious 13-year-old who betrayed his parents to the State and became an example for generations of Soviet youth. Orwell’s protagonist Winston Smith works in the Ministry of Truth, where he creates non-existent war heroes, like Captain Ogilvy, who die doing heroic and symbolic stuff to rally the proletariat.

Keeping that in mind, a few days ago, an Alabama doctor named Brytney Cobia authored a Facebook post that soon became viral.

I’ve made a LOT of progress encouraging people to get vaccinated lately!!! Do you want to know how? I’m admitting young healthy people to the hospital with very serious COVID infections. One of the last things they do before they’re intubated is beg me for the vaccine. I hold their hand and tell them that I’m sorry, but it’s too late. A few days later when I call time of death, I hug their family members and I tell them the best way to honor their loved one is to go get vaccinated and encourage everyone they know to do the same. They cry. And they tell me they didn’t know. They thought it was a hoax. They thought it was political. They thought because they had a certain blood type or a certain skin color they wouldn’t get as sick. They thought it was ‘just the flu’. But they were wrong. And they wish they could go back. But they can’t. So they thank me and they go get the vaccine. And I go back to my office, write their death note, and say a small prayer that this loss will save more lives.

As always, I am an open book. Please bring me your questions and I will tell you everything I know and everything I don’t.

It’s not too late, but some day it might be.

To call this ghoulish is an understatement. You can almost see the conga line of scrub-clad “health care professionals” lurking at stage left.

Iran #dancingnurses and doctors, from this past March. pic.twitter.com/jfWowa48Oo

— Hey, Dave! (@davegreenidge57) August 13, 2020

The near gloating terms used as she describes herself getting to tell someone, “I told you so,” right before they could make you throw up in your mouth. On the whole, I’d take my chances on my own rather than to submit to the tender mercies of someone who obviously holds me in contempt. I have some questions about the entire story. For instance, according to the CDC, there has not been a single COVID-related death in Alabama under 40 in over a month. There have only been 110 such deaths in Alabama since the pandemic started. There is no public data, so far as I can find, that gives the number of intubated patients, the number of patients in the ICU by age, etc., since the vaccine became available. The absence of empirical data to back up undocumented anecdotes doesn’t give me great confidence in the story. And the source is a Facebook post.

Whether the story is fact or fiction, what is not debatable is that other versions of this story are making the rounds. For instance:

‘They Beg me for the Vaccine’: Nurses Share Stories of Unvaccinated Patients Fighting COVID-19. This story focuses on the Cobia Facebook post and adds this:

I actually cried a little when I read that story. A lot of us have experienced some variation of that story, those of us working in hospitals in the past year,” said Andrea Muir.

Muir is a registered nurse at Sharp Memorial in San Diego and said she’s seeing firsthand an increase in the number of COVID-19 patients.

Muir recalled the story of an unvaccinated man whose oxygen levels were dropping and fought off nurses as they tried desperately to help him.

“’COVID’s not even real.’ He was using all of his energy to argue with us about this thing being real, while it was literally killing him,” Muir remembered.

This vignette is interesting because Muir recycles an urban legend that was all the rage this time last year.

A South Dakota ER nurse @JodiDoering says her Covid-19 patients often “don’t want to believe that Covid is real.”

“Their last dying words are, ‘This can’t be happening. It’s not real.’ And when they should be… Facetiming their families, they’re filled with anger and hatred.” pic.twitter.com/tgUgP6znAT

— New Day (@NewDay) November 16, 2020

Read CNN’s South Dakota Nurse’s Story Unravels Even Further, and It Just Gets Strange for more details on this story.

‘That time has passed’: Arkansas doctor shares anguish of telling dying Covid patients it’s too late for vaccine is basically the Alabama story in a different locale.

A doctor in Arkansas says dying Covid patients beg him for a vaccine, and he has to tell them it’s too late.

“I see someone daily – for the last three weeks – that is possibly dying, certainly very sick, that asks if they can get their vaccine,” Dr Michael Bolding told CNN. “And it is heartbreaking to tell them that that time has passed, that that was five to six weeks ago to prevent this.”

Dr Bolding works at Washington Regional Medical Center in Fayetteville, Arkansas. That state, along with Missouri, has become the epicentre of the United States’ latest wave of the coronavirus, which is wreaking havoc on regions with low vaccination rates. In Arkansas, only 44.8 per cent of adults are fully vaccinated.

Dr Bolding says the situation at his hospital is “heartbreaking”.

“I literally just came from a patient’s room in his 20s, and it took six people to get him in a prone position on the ventilator,” he told CNN. “We are seeing 20 and 30-year-olds dying now from a preventable illness.”

Only 13 people in Arkansas under 25 have died from the Wuhan virus in Arkansas since the pandemic started. His hospital has a 32% ICU utilization rate.

We have this novel twist on the story from the Forth Worth Star-Telegram: Unvaccinated Texas mom and dad on ventilators beg their 4 kids to get COVID shots.

It’s likely too late for Lydia Rodriguez to get vaccinated – she and her husband, Lawrence, are breathing with the help of machines in a Texas intensive care unit – but their four children, she hopes, will get the shots.

“One of the last things she said before being intubated was to make sure her kids get vaccinated,” Rodriguez’ cousin Dottie Jones said in a Facebook post.

Lydia and Lawrence Rodriguez, of La Marque, were admitted to a hospital three weeks ago, ill with COVID-19, KTRK reported. Despite constant medical care, the virus has continued ravaging their bodies.
…
“My 42 yo cousin didn’t believe in the vaccine. Now she and her husband are in the ICU on vents fighting for their lives with this delta variant while their 4 children are at home,” Jones said on Facebook.

The New York Times has this offering: They Spurned the Vaccine. Now They Want You to Know They Regret It.

As Mindy Greene spent another day in the Covid intensive care unit, listening to the whirring machines that now breathed for her 42-year-old husband, Russ, she opened her phone and tapped out a message.

“We did not get the vaccine,” she wrote on Facebook. “I read all kinds of things about the vaccine and it scared me. So I made the decision and prayed about it and got the impression that we would be ok.”

They were not.

Her husband, the father to their four children, was now hovering between life and death, tentacles of tubes spilling from his body. The patient in the room next to her husband’s had died hours earlier. That day, July 13, Ms. Greene decided to add her voice to an unlikely group of people speaking out in the polarized national debate over vaccination: the remorseful.

“If I had the information I have today, we would have gotten vaccinated,” Ms. Greene wrote. Come what may, she hit “send.”

Some of these stories might very well be true; others are the stuff of urban legends. What they all have in common is trading upon a real or imagined tragedy to claim that a vaccine would have averted it when, according to the CDC and media, the vaccine does not work all that well against the so-called “Delta variant.” The same story being repeated is just too pat, too reminiscent of a Maoist struggle session where miscreants are forced to engage in public displays of self-criticism.

The health care nazis and the White House are desperate to get everyone vaccinated. Why? We don’t know because they are telling us that vaccinated people can be just as communicable as the unvaccinated. Some vaccine makers are saying that their shots need a booster, or two, to protect properly. There is obviously a boatload of money involved in this campaign, and one can’t help but get the nagging feeling that something else is also going on that is obscured for the time being.