As the United Kingdom, like the United States, faces a crisis-level shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) for health care workers in the front-line fight against the coronavirus pandemic, Britain’s National Health Service has reached out to suppliers all over the country—including companies that supply gear for use in medical fetish activity.
The site MedFetUK, a supplier of medical fetish gear, revealed last week that it had “donated our entire stock of disposable scrubs to an NHS hospital.” In a Twitter post, the site said that it was able to donate only a few sets of scrubs because “we don't carry large stocks, but they were desperate, so we sent them free of charge.”
The site did not identify the hospital that received the scrubs formerly intended for fetishists, saying that it wanted to avoid becoming part of a political dispute.
Nonetheless, the site sounded the alarm about the dire situation for British health care workers treating coronavirus patients while struggling to protect themselves from the highly contagious disease.
“When we, a tiny company set up to serve a small section of the kink community, find ourselves being sought out as a last-resort supplier to our National Health Service in a time of crisis, something is seriously wrong. In fact, it's scandalous,” the site said in a tweet.
“We are not heroes and we don't deserve any special kudos,” the fetish site added in a later Twitter post. “We just did the obvious and only right thing to do. The real heroes are the NHS staff at every level who are on the front line of this fight.”
In the U.S., the tube site PornHub last week donated 50,000 protective surgical masks to hospitals and first responders in New York City, who also face critical shortages of PPE in the city that has been hardest hit in the country by the coronavirus pandemic.
The United Kingdom has reported 25,474 coronavirus cases, with 1,793 fatalities caused by the disease, according to statistics compiled by Johns Hopkins University. The United States leads the world in total cases with 181,099 as of Tuesday. The U.S. has seen 3,606 deaths.
Photo by Master Sgt. Cohen Young / Wikimedia Commons Public Domain
