The retail pharmacist, backbone of the retail community’s battle with COVID-19, is pushing back against the punishing demands being exacted in the war against the current pandemic. With good reason.

In their unending war with COVID, U.S. retailers are, understandably, asking more of the in-store pharmacist than can reasonably be requested — or demanded.

In his or her role as a first line of defense against COVID, pharmacists are now routinely required to serve as doctor, counselor, nurse practitioner and primary caregiver, in addition to performing the role he or she was initially hired to do: dispense prescriptions.

Along the way, the traditional rule book that has always dictated and governed such basic operational guidelines as hours and days on the job have been discarded. In-store pharmacists today are governed by the needs of the moment; they are expected to perform when, how and as often as needed, and asked to do the job at hand. This, after all, is the most dire crisis the retail community has faced in the lives of the U.S. communities in which they live and work. And, as so many others in those communities, pharmacists are being asked (told) to step up.

In the main, they are doing so. However, there are glaring and jarring exceptions.

Some pharmacists are deserting their posts, their jobs and their industry. Others are voicing their displeasure, often vocally, sometimes publicly, always understandably. In the main, they are publicly claiming that this isn’t what they signed on for, that their primary role has traditionally been one of helping care for patients, not tolerating their abuse at care delivered too late or not at all, at vaccinations delayed or dispensed with, at promises voiced but not kept, at indifference bordering on ineptitude.

The urgent questions that have emerged in this crisis within a crisis are these: Is this behavior justified? What recourse do the retailers have in the face of this dramatic, if understandable, revolution?

Sadly, there are no easy answers. Are pharmacists justified in this behavior? Of course they are. In the history of this laudable profession, the current stresses placed on individual pharmacists are more than they can reasonably be expected to tolerate. Far more.

What recourse do the retailers have to counter or mitigate this behavior and dereliction of duty? Sadly again, the immediate answer is none.

Well, actually, there is one remedy. Put this devastating disaster behind us. Finally, once and for all.

And indeed, we are trying. Amid missteps and false starts, we’re making progress. Slowly but indisputably. Step by painful step.

Until D Day finally arrives, the people who run and manage America’s retail pharmacies have only one option: Try a little tenderness. Pharmacists will continue to gripe, fight back and desert their posts, many forever. In the process, they will throw away their careers, their livelihoods, their dreams, their hopes for the future. And there is little or nothing retail managers can do.

What little they can do is both obvious and difficult. Put yourselves in the other guy’s place. Imagine, if you can, how difficult the job has become. Wait for the inevitable end to this dreaded pandemic.

And try a little tenderness.