Once more: Do you mask around your patients to maintain your oath? If no, why not?

Wearing a respirator is a simple way to tell your patients who are disabled, chronically ill, immunocompromised, or have long COVID that you refuse to be a part of their ongoing harm. It would show us you refuse to be a vector for the virus that disabled them.

Are you subconsciously dismissing the risks to your own health, even if your patients show you the effects daily?

Is it simply too inconvenient to acknowledge the systemic, ongoing nature of the pandemic?

I want to understand the cognitive dissonance.

Is it a perceived lack of immediate personal risk?

Have you been ridiculed by your peers for continuing to protect yourself?

Has the “back to normal” sentiment been weaponized in your workplace?

Please give me a genuine answer. I’m not looking for the policy excuse adopted by hospitals concerned with a bottom line. Not the “we’re all fatigued from wearing masks” excuse. From one professional to another—and I am a professional of my chronic illness and disability—

If you know and understand the severity of the virus, why do you not take the most basic, evidence-based precaution to protect yourselves, your staff, your families, and your patients from transmitting or acquiring it?

My question is for doctors who understand and believe the mounting body of research that demonstrates the severity and population-wide nature of COVID infections, and who have seen firsthand the damage to patients like myself.

We know you see dozens of patients a day, in enclosed office spaces that do not guarantee ventilation or HEPA filtration. The environment of a medical setting continues to be high-risk.

We know COVID is airborne. There is a massive amount of research concluding that COVID-19 is vascular, causes brain damage, can disable previously healthy people, and that since 2020 young people are having heart attacks and strokes at higher rates.

even if the doctor happens to acknowledge that my chronic debilitating symptoms are caused by a prior COVID infection, I observe a stark contradiction: they refuse to wear a respirator mask like a KN95 or N95 themselves.