© SAM WHITNEY; GETTY IMAGES
A desperate, outraged
Twitter thread from a South Dakota emergency room nurse went viral last weekend, landing its author a live interview on CNN. "When I read some of your tweets, my jaw dropped," the host told Jodi Doering, referring to her account of
gravely ill patients who "scream at you for a magic medicine and that Joe Biden is going to ruin the USA. All while gasping for breath."
"The reason I tweeted what I did is that it wasn't one particular patient," the nurse said. "It's just a culmination of
so many people, and their last, dying words are, 'This can't be happening, it's not real.' And when they should be spending time FaceTime-ing their families, they're filled with anger and hatred, and it just made me really sad."
These were astonishing statements, and, not surprisingly, they captured the attention of millions. Multiple
US senators and
Pulitzer-prize-winning journalists were among the throngs who tweeted out the CNN interview, which was also written up by
The Washington Post and
other mainstream outlets.
"This is the cost of disinformation," wrote
Atul Gawande, a
New Yorker contributor and
member of Joe Biden's coronavirus task force. Senator Elizabeth Warren called it "heartbreaking."
There's no doubt that we owe a deep debt of gratitude to Jodi Doering and all the frontline medical personnel dealing with the current surge in Covid cases. The work they do is truly heroic. Still, the manner in which Doering's account of her experience has been reported and circulated should give people pause.
Doering's statement that she's watched "so many" people die from the disease even as they deny its very existence, endlessly repeated on social media and presented by news outlets without corroboration, would seem to represent a broader phenomenon.
But other nurses who work in similar settings say they've seen nothing of the kind.
Comment: Intersectionality taken to its absurd conclusion.