How Should We Respond to the Vaccine-Hesitant? With Dr. Jay Baruch

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With hospitals full, how should we respond to the vaccine-hesitant? An ER doctor weighs in.

As an ER doctor, Jay Baruch has been treating Covid patients since the start of the pandemic. He still sees many patients sick with Covid in his ER – the vast majority unvaccinated.

It might seem reasonable for him to share the anger and frustration that many vaccinated Americans feel about the unvaxxed. While Jay (as he likes to be called) wants everyone who is eligible to get the shot, he says judgment does nothing to persuade the hesitant to get the vaccine, and that there is a better way to respond.

Jay is a Professor of Emergency Medicine at Brown University’s Alpert Medical School. He is also a writer. He recently wrote a piece for STAT, a news site about health, medicine, and the life sciences in which he discusses his desire for a more open dialogue about vaccination, one that involves listening to people’s stories, empathizing with their concerns, and recognizing that all human beings are complicated. Listen for an enlightening approach on this episode of “Let’s Find Common Ground.”

Read more from Jay on STAT: It’s easy to judge the unvaccinated. As a doctor, I see a better alternative

Read the Episode Transcript

Ep. 41: How Should We Respond to the Vaccine-Hesitant? With Dr. Jay Baruch

Jay Baruch

Jay Baruch, MD, is Professor of Emergency Medicine at Alpert Medical School of Brown University, where he serves as the director of the Medical Humanities and Bioethics Scholarly Concentration.

Tornado of Life: Constraints and Creativity in the ER, a book of non-fiction narrative essays, is forthcoming from MIT Press in Fall 2022. He’s also the author of two award-winning short fiction collections, What’s Left Out (Kent State University Press, 2015) and Fourteen Stories: Doctors, Patients, and Other Strangers (Kent State University Press, 2007).

Follow him on Twitter at @JBaruchMD.

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