I’m a Veteran and Doctor. The President Calling the Death of Doctors “Beautiful” is an Outrage.
By: Committee To Protect Medicare
Tags: Healthcare, Coronavirus, Heroes, Physicians, Doctors

By Max Cooper, MD, Pennsylvania emergency physician and Navy veteran

As a veteran and an emergency physician, I struggle to call death “beautiful,” as President Trump did this week.

During a visit in Pennsylvania, the president said doctors and nurses are “running into death just like soldiers running into bullets” and that “it’s a beautiful thing to see.”

No matter how many times President Trump, who skipped serving in Vietnam not once but five times, glorifies death, those of us who see it know that death is excruciating and heartbreaking.

In Afghanistan, while serving as an emergency physician at Kandahar Airfield, I witnessed death all too regularly. Often gruesome. Always somber. Never beautiful.

The COVID-19 patients I’ve cared for and who survived often describe their suffering as not being able to breathe, a painful and terrifying sensation. Though they lived, these patients described the simultaneous helplessness, paralysis and prolonged agony they experienced as the closest near-death sensation they could imagine.

With COVID-19, every death is mournful and disheartening. To prevent the spread of COVID-19, critically ill patients are isolated in their negative-pressure ICU rooms, alone. Those who are conscious speak to their wives and husbands, fathers, mothers and children through the small screens of smartphones, held in the gloved hands of nurses and doctors. Those attached to a ventilator and unconscious hear without hearing their loved ones cry in anguish.

Nothing about death is beautiful for the countless medical and health workers who go to work every day to confront the sheer volume of deaths daily without succumbing to the rising tide of anxiety and depression. Nothing about death is beautiful to emergency physicians and nurses who worry every moment that, despite doing everything right, they may get infected with COVID-19. If that were to happen in my case, I would be bringing a highly contagious, lethal coronavirus home to, among others, elderly in-laws who live with me and a one-year-old child.

No health worker simply doing our jobs to save lives, no member of our family or those who’ve suffered and died from COVID-19, should be used as cheap props for Mr. Trump’s chest-thumping battlefield fantasies.

In reality, the commander in chief who once boasted that the pandemic makes him a “wartime president” and that he’d always ensure our troops never run out of ammunition, is derelict in his duty if frontline forces fighting COVID-19 are wearing trash bags into battle.

Mr. Trump’s failures in leadership are extensive. He refuses to listen to data, science and the consensus of medical and public health expert opinion. Doctors and health workers warned him, and continue to warn, that we need more masks, more ventilators, more swabs and testing reagents, and more robust social distancing guidelines. He ignored our warnings then and continues to ignore us now.

Instead of fully deploying the Defense Production Act so we have what we need to beat back this virus, Mr. Trump accused us of stealing masks and called testing overrated, even as he and his inner circle get tested regularly. Now, he flatters health workers as “warriors” even as he sends us into battle without giving us the bullets and the armor to protect people and fight back against COVID-19.

Mr. Trump doesn’t understand that our crumbling economy can only be fixed if we get our public health response to the pandemic right. The ability to test millions of people a day, track their contacts and isolate those who are COVID-19 positive is the best way to slowly reopen the economy. Americans want to know Mr. Trump can keep them safe when they return to their workplaces, schools and hair salons. To him, masks and stay-at-home orders — while sound protections from infections — get in the way of his only priority, reopening the economy.

Four months into this pandemic, Mr. Trump has given Americans mixed messages, wishful thinking and dangerous nonsense like bleach injections.

A death hurts more when we know it could have been prevented, especially as public health experts now tell us that many COVID-19 deaths could have been averted had Mr. Trump acted sooner.

Mr. Trump fancies himself a “good general.” I’ve served under good generals. Responsible generals don’t treat troops like cannon fodder. And they don’t go AWOL while tens of thousands of Americans die on the battlefield.

Max Cooper, MD, RDMS, is an emergency physician in southeastern Pennsylvania and served in Afghanistan in the Navy. He is the Pennsylvania state lead for the Committee to Protect Medicare.