That's a great question!

My response is that, like everything, there's a ton of nuance.

It requires a very careful reading of that article, paying attention to not just what they say, but what they explicitly fail to say.

First, I couldn't find any reference in that article to people being denied care, did I miss it?

But regardless, it's a really great example of what causes a lot of my deep suspicion. For example, the article details the low hospitalization rate amongst all vaccinated people, with lots of zeros after the decimal point, presenting it as evidence for the effectiveness of the vaccine - however, it doesn't mention anywhere the rate of hospitalization for the unvaccinated. Most likely because the numbers would look very similar to the reader.

Another example, the article says that most of the vaccinated covid patients are elderly, or those with severe comorbidities. It doesn't mention, however, that that is also true for the unvaccinated.

Another omission - the article doesn't discuss the difference between patients with covid, and patients admitted because of covid. That's an important variable, but until recently it's been a bit suppressed.

Another thing the article fails to mention is confounding factors like age when considering vaccination rate and infection rate. It's a confounding factor because (according to what I've read) the most completely vaccinated are young, healthy people. Many cranky older people like myself are not. That's a pretty important confounding factor when you're looking at hospitalizations and comparing populations.

The article is pretty heavy on hyperbole, but doesn't mention that hospitals (especially the ICU's) are designed to operate at or near capacity. Hospitals are sized based on the community they serve and must remain mostly utilized in order to remain profitable.

One fun thing to do that demonstrates this is to go back and search for articles for years prior to Covid, where there would be hysterical articles about the flu "overwhelming hospitals" and "ICUs at 99%" etc... it's an old trick that the media plays, historically it was to garner ratings/clicks. Is that still the reason? Could be.

That article is deeply misleading, at best, in my opinion. It goes to great lengths to paint a very distressing picture, without providing objective analysis. It's a great example of what I've been talking about.

I could mislead in the opposite direction. I could say something along the lines of "Great news everyone! Covid is over. In Tarrant County, for the first week of January, there were only a total of 11 deaths out of 22,000 cases, and all of those had underlying conditions. In january, your total risk of dying from covid was .000005, and if you are healthy it's zero! So hug everyone, don't worry!". According to the Tarrant County, TX Covid 19 dashboard and tracker, everything I just wrote it 100% true, but it's highly misleading.

It's completely understandable how someone could be mislead by an article like the one you referenced. I typically try to avoid the media reporting like that because the quality is so poor, to quote Thomas Jefferson "Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle."

I typically go to reputable medical journals and critically evaluate the studies (to the best of my ability). It gives me a very different picture than articles like that paint.