Cedar Rapids doctor: Can Iowa leave politics behind and do the right thing on COVID?

I have been a pediatrician in Cedar Rapids for 40 years. Along with the aches and pains that inevitably come with getting older, come the greatest assets to those physicians who have made the practice of medicine their passion and life-the gifts of wisdom and knowledge borne of experience.

I remember as a child lining up to get a sugar cube soaked with protection from polio. I have a friend who died with meningitis when I was a sophomore at Washington and another friend who lost a daughter to the same infection in less than a day. I talk about them nearly every day in our clinic. I have spent hundreds of nights in the hospital caring for the sickest infants and children in Cedar Rapids. I have seen the devastating effects of infections caused by diseases that are now largely prevented by vaccines. I can never forget those children who died with overwhelming bacterial infections or the child who didn’t wake up at home because his airway was closed by a bacterial infection while he slept or those children who lost parts of their hands and feet or their hearing.

The vaccines that now prevent those tragedies are effective, safe, and have saved thousands of lives. Those vaccines were embraced by parents just as the polio vaccine was in the 1950s.

What has changed? Fueled largely by misinformation on the internet, vaccine hesitancy has reared its ugly head as anti-vaxxers work to spread groundless lies and fear and to reverse decades of public health progress. Even worse, the issue has now become a political one.

But now we are confronted by a new infectious killer, the likes of which the world has not seen in the past century. Millions are dead worldwide and more than 6,000 Iowans have died. But we have very effective ways of limiting COVID’s spread and severity. Over five billion doses of vaccine have been administered worldwide, and 367 million doses have been administered in the United States. The risk of significant adverse effects is minimal and far less than that of the disease itself.

But what about masks? Are they effective? As anyone working in the trenches in medicine can tell you, never have there been fewer respiratory infections for such a prolonged period of time. Ear infection and asthma episodes plummeted as did visits to ER’s, urgent care clinics, and primary care offices. Even when the vast majority of Iowa students attended school face-to-face last year, minimal respiratory infections occurred.

Only when the middle-of-the night unmasking legislation was signed in Des Moines in May did respiratory infections resurface. Now, as children return to school, we are struggling with a completely unprecedented summer epidemic surge of respiratory disease. COVID cases have skyrocketed and the percentage of pediatric infection has increased by 400 percent. This is a different disease than we have seen in the past. Having 1,000 times more virus particles in your nose has a way of changing the ground rules.

But we have ways to decrease the spread of COVID. Get vaccinated. It is both safe and extraordinarily effective at preventing severe disease. All my children and those grandchildren old enough to receive it have been immunized. And wear masks at least in close quarters.

But those two easy and free interventions have become political. Teachers wearing masks have been assaulted by mask opponents. Demonstrators call vaccine and mask mandates un-American.

A few days ago I had a precious little boy in the office who has someone else’s heart beating in his chest. Another child came in with cystic fibrosis along with another child who had chest surgery to open a narrowed airway and another child with Down syndrome. The ex-prematures on oxygen, diabetics, and children on chemotherapy didn’t happen to be on the schedule that day.

Those children are too young to be protected by the vaccine, and I have dedicated my life to helping them and their families. I try to understand the personal liberty argument about the harmless act of wearing a mask, but struggle. After all, isn’t the greatest liberty of all our right to life? And if one of those innocent children has their life taken in the name of mask opposition which can ONLY be described as a political position, I ask, whose liberty has truly been stolen?

It’s not about us individually. It’s about everyone. What really is the American thing to do? Can we for once put politics behind us and do what is right as human beings and Americans? Can we not protect those who cannot protect themselves?

Dr. Scott Nau is a pediatrician who practices in Cedar Rapids.