Aside from Beth Moore, Karen Swallow Prior is a supreme moral busybody in the Southern Baptist Convention. Aptly named, she has been a hardcore purveyor of panic porn. On Tuesday evening she took to Twitter to attack Christians for proliferating a culture of death because of their opposition to lockdowns and mask mandates. She tweeted:
LA Hospitals are so overwhelmed by Covid patients, ambulances are being ordered to stop transporting patients to hospitals if they have virtually no chance of surviving.
— Karen Swallow Prior (Notorious KSP) (@KSPrior) January 6, 2021
The culture of death we “pro-life” Christians warned about is here.
We brought it. https://t.co/PTNIRkfSkH
But before we dig into this Tweet, it would appear that she did not accurately represent the article. While the article presupposes the fake narrative that Hospitals operating at capacity during flu season is unprecedented, the article itself describes a more positive development in EMS care.
The memo that LA County EMS workers are being given is not to deny care for people. Rather it is to provide care on scene rather than en route to the hospital. The actual article states:
“We are not abandoning resuscitation,” Gausche-Hill said. “We are absolutely doing best practice resuscitation and that is do it in the field, do it right away… What we’re asking is that — which is slightly different than before — is that we are emphasizing the fact that transporting these patients arrested leads to very poor outcomes. We knew that already and we just don’t want to impact our hospitals.”
In essence, we have a situation here where hospitals being at capacity leads to innovations in medical care. LA County EMS services believe that treating people on scene will save more lives and ease hospital burdens. This is a good thing (assuming that these medical claims are true), and we would not have this without hospitals operating at capacity.
Being a doctor is like any other job, in that, there are periods of heavy workloads. Under normal circumstances the public would not know whether a hospital is at capacity, nor would we suggest public policy to act on this information. This is necessary because if we strive to maintain that our hospitals never reach full capacity, full capacity will decrease. This is especially true in single payer countries, like the UK and Italy who reportedly could not handle coronavirus.
Karen Swallow Prior believes these nuances of a healthcare system are the responsibility of Christians, and that this memo (which she either doesn’t understand or intentionally misrepresents) serves as an indictment on our witness because of our higher than average tendencies to challenge the coronavirus narrative that we are being sold.
This is slander, not only because her charge is baseless due to her misunderstanding or misrepresentation of the material facts, but because she is advancing a nonfalsifiable narrative. California is a state that believes it can impose a curfew on people because of coronavirus. If their “mitigation” strategies fail, then it is the fault of people not following them, as opposed to the strategy not being grounded in science.
Karen Swallow Prior has little understanding that a coronavirus is going to spread regardless of mitigation strategy, and since it is mutating, it will also remain with us indefinitely. That’s how viruses work. But she is not interested in science or that there is no biblical basis that not wearing a mask or social distancing is murdering your neighbor (a similar claim to the one she makes). She is interested in attacking Christians who actually are loving their neighbor by challenging authoritarianism that threatens the liberty of all.
She is an accuser and deserves to be shunned.
One Response
Speaking as a retired Firefighter/EMT of The Memphis Fire Department (which is not nearly as large as LA County EMS) with 23 years and 7 months of experience; I understand 100% the Gausche-Hill statement quoted in the article. in hospital emergency room care of a full cardiac/respiratory arrest patient is no different than that care performed by EMS personnel in the field, and produces a no greater survival rate of the patients.
“In the prehospital setting, among participating centers in the Resuscitation Outcomes Consortium (ROC) Epistry, survival from out-of-hospital arrest ranged from 3.0% to 16.3%”.
Quoted from : Nichol G, Thomas E, Callaway CW, Hedges J, Powell JL, Aufderheide TP, Rea T, Lowe R, Brown T, Dreyer J, Davis D, Idris A, Stiell I; Resuscitation Outcomes Consortium Investigators. Regional variation in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest incidence and outcome [published correction appears in JAMA. 2008;300:1763]. JAMA. 2008;300:1423–1431.
“In the hospital setting, among participating centers in the Get With The Guidelines-Resuscitation quality improvement program, the median hospital survival rate from adult cardiac arrest is 18%.”
Granted, a 1.7% difference in survival rates would seem significant to the patient or family member of the patient. But, those in hospital statistics are for patients already in the hospital at the time of cardiac arrest, not those arriving to the emergency room aboard an ambulance.