Opinion | Health care workers deserve our steadfast support, not just during a coronavirus pandemic
- It is an irony that Hong Kong is now stopping to clap for the health care workers who were harassed during last year’s protests
- Attitudes around the world towards medics are not always appreciative: expect attitudes to change when these workers start demanding compensation for Covid-19 oversight
There has been an international outpouring of public tributes to health care workers who have made selfless sacrifices during the Covid-19 pandemic. So why is Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organisation, choosing this moment to tweet: “Health care is #NotATarget. … Attacks on health care are attacks on humanity …”?
The uncomfortable truth is that in many countries, a contradictory and conflicted relationship exists with health care workers: they are applauded when it is convenient, but marginalised, even persecuted, when it is not.
A group composed of three United Nations special rapporteurs (for health, freedom of assembly and privacy) and the vice-chair of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention made public their concern that health care workers in Hong Kong had been subjected to harassment, intimidation, unlawful arrest and detention – their hands zip-tied behind their backs – despite acting in the highest traditions of providing care for the injured with impartiality.
Equally worryingly, they described the Hong Kong authorities’ wider circumscription of the safe space in health care during the protest movement – reports of breaches of medical privacy, for example, mean that access to medical treatment is effectively being restricted as a consequence of political expression.