The family member of an Idaho COVID-19 patient allegedly threatened a doctor who wouldn't treat the patient with invermectin, BuzzFeed News reports.
According to the Dr. Ashley Carvalho, police had to remove the man's son-in-law from the hospital after he told her, "If you don't do this, I have a lot of ways to get people to do something, and they're all sitting in my gun safe at home."
"I think it's just kind of a hopeless feeling," she said, speaking of the hostility that comes from some patients and their families directed at healthcare workers.
"Like other medical workers in her state, Carvalho is exhausted and exasperated," BuzzFeed News' David Mack writes. "Idaho currently has the lowest vaccination rate in the country, and the number of vaccine doses administered hasn't been climbing significantly — but infections have. As of Saturday, there were 686 patients hospitalized in the state with COVID, 180 of them in ICUs. That's hundreds more than what flooded hospitals during the previous surge in December 2020, before safe and effective vaccines were widely available."
Speaking to BuzzFeed News, Carvalho said she never thought she'd be more anxious about COVID-19 after the vaccine.
"Last year at this time, I was very anxious about COVID, and I was just hoping and hoping for the day when we'd have a vaccine," she said. "It never occurred to me that there would be a day when we have a vaccine, and I'm actually more anxious now because we have something that can really prevent this and people aren't taking it."