ICU doctor reveals 90 per cent of Covid patients in his ward are vaccine refuseniks 

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The UK vaccine rollout has been hugely successful with more than three-quarters of adults (75.7 per cent) having now received two jabs. 

However, the highly infectious Delta variant of the Covid virus is spreading — some 37,314 new cases were reported yesterday — and patients are still falling seriously ill and being admitted to intensive care units (ICUs) across the country.

Sadly, some of them will die. Even more sadly, many of those deaths are entirely avoidable. Why? Because the vast majority of Covid patients presenting on ICU wards now are unvaccinated.

Here, a senior intensive care consultant at a leading teaching hospital gives a first-hand account of the pity and frustration he and his staff feel as they battle to save lives — and their anger with anti-vaxxers and Covid deniers whose influence has been a factor in so many of these unnecessary deaths.

For me and my staff, it is yet another late night in ICU. I am standing in scrubs and full PPE, surveying the cramped 22-bed ward, sealed off from the rest of the hospital. It is eerily quiet, just the low hum of ventilators and the bleeps of the monitors.

Ten of the beds are occupied by Covid victims — each bed adjacent to a ventilator pumping oxygen into the heavily-sedated patients. Clinical staff are constantly checking the screens for readouts on heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen levels and a host of other data.

All of it is electronically captured and interpreted by the dedicated bedside nurse and handful of trainee doctors who are led by a consultant — in this case me.

I feel sorry for the men and women lying here, plugged in to the machines.

I don’t know many of them personally — by the time they arrive, it’s usually too late for a conversation — but it’s impossible not to feel compassion for those on the brink of death.

Yet the depressing truth is that most of these desperately ill patients should not be here at all.

During the first wave of the virus, I reckon we lost about 20 out of 74 Covid patients and in the second wave, 38 patients out of 96.

Now we are in the third wave, it is different. We have the vaccines, thank goodness, and most UK adults have been double-jabbed.

The NHS vaccine programme has dramatically weakened the link between Covid and death — some 100,000 lives have been saved by the jab, according to the latest figures. And, as reflected in the data, we are seeing a much lower level of hospitalisations nationally.

But the patients here and in other ICUs around the country are still dying from Covid — sometimes horrible deaths — because, all too often, they have refused the vaccine.

Looking at their medical notes I know that all the Covid patients currently on the unit were offered the jab but that 90 per cent of those on ventilators here are unvaccinated. I understand this figure is roughly the same at most other units.

It is a chilling statistic and one that makes me absolutely furious. Not with the patients — my heart goes out to them for what they and their families are going through. The havoc wreaked on the lungs by Covid and the desperate sense of not being able to breathe is not something I would wish anyone to endure.

No, my quarrel is with those who perpetuate the myths that the virus does not exist or that Covid vaccines are dangerous. Their false claims are killing people.

One of my vaccine-refusenik patients was so convinced that the Covid pandemic was a ‘conspiracy’ that he was still insisting loudly that ‘Covid doesn’t exist’ even as — struggling to breathe — he was being sedated prior to being placed on a ventilator.

Unfortunately, he didn’t make it — and all of us who witnessed his avoidable death felt moved by the sheer waste of that life.

Two of the nurses who were with him in his last desperate moments were in tears. He had a wife and two young children: inevitably they couldn’t be with him when he died.

The misinformation put forward by the Covid-deniers, the conspiracy theorists, the anti-vaxxers and other attention-seeking fruitcakes — mainly via social media — is having a catastrophic effect. It is undermining the monumental efforts of the NHS and of its dedicated staff to cope with the most significant public health emergency of modern times.

Worryingly, we are also seeing a big rise in the number of young people admitted to hospital for high oxygen therapy. Some believe that their youth should be enough to protect them from the worst ravages of the virus but others have swallowed the propaganda and rejected the offer of vaccination.

Sadly, we in the NHS have not yet found an effective way of countering the fake and downright dangerous news that has been spilling out about the pandemic and the vaccines. And, as a result, we are seeing patients who refuse to accept that Covid exists or that the vaccines are safe and effective being stretchered daily into this hospital.

By the time they come up to ICU, most are at death’s door.

Take Pete, one of my patients: he was knocking on that door very loudly when he was admitted to ICU in July. A 50-year-old mechanical engineer, he had called an ambulance when his breathlessness got too much. He was admitted to a general ward and then, as he deteriorated, he was transferred up to us.

At all costs, we wanted to avoid having to put him on the ventilator, which would have made him more vulnerable to secondary infections. We tried blowing high-flow oxygen up his nose; we fitted him with a tight face mask pressurising the oxygen delivered to his lungs — which is torture when you are experiencing extreme ‘air hunger’ because of Covid — all to no avail.

To give you some idea of how much oxygen Pete was needing, imagine you were scuba diving with a tank of oxygen that would allow you to stay underwater for 40 hours. Pete would go through that in 15 minutes.

He was a big bloke — yes, overweight but also strong. When he was admitted to ICU we had a chat –—brief because he could barely breathe, let alone speak — and that’s when he told me refusing the vaccine was the ‘worst decision of my life’.

Later I learned that his mates, work colleagues, people he drank with down the pub, had seeded doubt in his mind about its safety. Pete lived alone and there were no other voices to tell him differently.

‘Worst…decis…ion…of…my…life,’ he wheezed again just before we put him off to sleep prior to ventilation. He was aware this could be the last conscious moment in his life. I knew that he was terrified but the effort of breathing had taken so much out of him he knew he couldn’t go on.

Most of the time it doesn’t take a lot of energy to breathe. With lung failure, every drop of energy you have is going into the physical struggle of getting oxygen to your lungs —there’s none left over for anything else. Your brain shuts down and eventually you just stop. We had to take over his breathing before we got close to that stage.

We monitored Pete over the next few days. He was going downhill fast and also battling the spiral of physical collapse and its consequences: dialysis, numerous drugs and drips, and the daily horrors of a procedure known as ‘proning’ — turning him over onto his stomach to improve the amount of oxygen getting into his blood.

Pete was 20 st so for us this was really hard work: it needed a team of seven people. What if a tube was accidentally pulled out? It could easily happen — he might be dead before we could get it back in.

And all the wires to which he was attached, and the intravenous lines delivering carefully calculated doses of drugs at certain times… some of which could not be stopped under any circumstance.

We had to be extraordinarily careful. Everyone had to know exactly what their job was and how it would be done.

I spent a lot of time thinking about Pete and where his anti-vaxxer fears had come from. I got the impression that he and his mates believed that the vaccines were part of a sinister Government conspiracy.

The politicians — including the Prime Minister and the then health secretary Matt Hancock — wanted to alter their DNA, to destroy their fertility and insert microchips into their body via the vaccine to monitor their activities. Of all this, Pete had been absolutely convinced. What he couldn’t explain was the motive. Why should the British state be so ruthless and cruel to its own citizens?

Another of my patients, James, who was in his 50s, educated and intelligent, suffered a collapsed lung — caused by his desperate struggle to breathe — shortly after he arrived in ICU.

He had tested positive for Covid but didn’t ‘believe’ in the virus. I told him we needed to put in a chest drain to prevent him getting worse.

He TOLD me he didn’t have Covid, because it didn’t exist. This was despite the fact that other family members — including his brother who was also in hospital — were infected as well.

The pandemic and the virus were all a figment of the media’s imagination, he insisted, part of a global conspiracy to repress the rights of individuals like him.

And because Covid didn’t exist, he wouldn’t agree to a chest drain. Tired and fractious after a busy week, I’m ashamed to say that I got up, told him that I didn’t have time for this and made to walk away. ‘No, no! Doctor!’ He motioned me back with his hand. ‘OK, OK,’ he said.

We treated him with the best we could offer — but he died a fortnight later.

I felt sad about that and when I think about him, I do not see a bombastic fool, refusing to face the facts. I see a desperately frightened man who knew what horrors and pain he’d face further down the line but who was clinging to some hopeless positivity that the Covid-19 virus was an illusion.

Derek, who was in his 80s, was also admitted to my unit. He’d refused the vaccine because he wanted to ‘wait and see’ if it was safe before he had it.

Given his age and vulnerability he must have been one of the first people offered it. I told him — at his age — it would have been best for him to take the risk.

Even if the vaccines are not 100 per cent effective, there is no question that they’ve given people of Derek’s age a second chance and kept them out of intensive care. Astonishingly, he survived.

These are just a few individuals I have encountered in recent months who said no to vaccination and paid the price.

As I have said, I don’t blame them but the handful of very vocal influencers who have exploited the internet to get their twisted messages across, claiming that it is all about ‘individual freedom’. But what value is ‘freedom’ if millions face endless lockdowns to control the virus? Look at Australia and New Zealand — both nations that have been slow to roll out a vaccine programme.

And what ‘freedom’ do those hooked up to ventilators have as they fight for life?

In the United States, the so-called ‘Disinformation Dozen’ — 12 key ‘influencers’ — are reportedly behind around two-thirds of the anti-vaxxer output online.

And in this country, too, we are faced with deranged claims about the pandemic and the jabs by some well-known conspiracy theorists.

They include Covid deniers such as Piers Corbyn (brother of Jeremy Corbyn), who believe that governments are trying to impose a new world order through lockdown which will include injecting people with microchips. Former Green Party activist David Icke (who is the self-proclaimed ‘Son of the Godhead’ and believes the Queen is a lizard) is also among them, as is former nurse Kate Shemirani.

At a Trafalgar Square protest recently, she suggested that NHS staff who administered the vaccine were like doctors and nurses who colluded with the Nazis. Together they peddle their crackpot claims via protest marches and demonstrations on hospital premises.

Reckless, self-serving antics like these leave me furious when I look at my exhausted and dedicated staff, at the patients clinging on to life and the resources invested in trying to keep them alive.

It’s worth pointing out prior to December 2020, around 850 healthcare workers died from Covid in the UK. I know many of those I work with thought nothing of risking their own lives to save others.

Eventually, there will be a Covid inquiry and uncomfortable truths may emerge for politicians, scientists and, yes, the NHS, too. 

But I also feel that those who actively and malignly sought to discredit the vaccine and to destroy trust in NHS staff should be held to account — in court if possible.

To end on a happier note, let me update you on my patient Pete. We got him off the ventilator and he’s back on a general ward. He’s not properly aware of where he is, is too weak to stand but can just about sit on the side of the bed.

For him, the long slow stagger back to — hopefully — full health and normality has only just begun. He remembers little of what has happened to him in the last couple of months. Perhaps he’s even forgotten that refusing the vaccine was the worst decision of his life.

The writer is Director of Intensive Care at a major teaching hospital. All names have been changed to protect patients’ anonymity.