While I have to agree with you on some points, I cannot agree with all of your points. Pharmacists are not as prominent as frontline workers, by which you mean "working directly and seeing patients in emergent situations, measuring vitals, etc". But it's because our roles are just different as healthcare professionals. What you mentioned are roles of nurses and doctors, not pharmacists. Pharmacists dispense medications, check allergies, interactions, make sure we are preparing and delivering correct meds, dose, etc to the patients, and counseling. Do you think nurses and doctors would be able to do what they do, if there were not pharmacists who prepare and check meds and do what we do for patients? It's not that we are not useful in situations like this as frontline workers, we just have different roles, and we are in fact making sure patients are getting the best care and saving lives as much as nurses and doctors. I have heard numerous thank-you's from patients, thanking us for what we do in times like this.
And yes, there are actually a lot of nurses and doctors who work remotely. In fact, a lot of outpatient doctor offices (even ER departments did not allow patients in without checking patients's symptoms first over the phone) have been closed and working remotely, using telecommunications over the phone, etc for patient appointments. While you can criticize some negative things about this profession, you cannot make it sound like what pharmacists do are useless and not as important as what other professionals do. For one thing, pharmacists are easily accessible, so patients come to us first for problems and questions. While we cannot prescribe, pharmacists working in some settings have protocols set up so that they can manage dosage just like doctors, although limited. It is in place in certain settings and there are a lot more to what we do than you or some people make it out to be. It would be great if we are granted some prescribing authority and our roles expanded (especially in some settings), because we would be able to help patients better.
I agree with you that we have to put patient care/safety first. We have to stay on top of things, and come up with ways we could help patients better. However, it's just not fair how you call many pharmacists whiners. I actually believe we are very much underappreciated for what we do (I am not talking about the pay at all here). In trying times like this, I can't believe you are blaming pharmacists for things that are out of our control and for things in fact rather irrelevant to our roles in the healthcare field, as a pharmacist yourself. We are certified immunizers and also have BLS training, so we could help out in situations needing these skills. Even during emergency situations like this, there are still many patients who need their daily meds and need someone that they could easily reach to address their questions before they reach out to the doctors.
And I honestly think you are not a pharmacist. I don't know what your real profession is, and you may have some basic knowledge about the profession of pharmacy, probably from observation, but you don't sound like someone who has any passion for the profession itself and you are just bitter/jealous. Advising students who are considering pharmacy school to rethink it because it's very saturated is one thing, trash talking the profession completely without any meaningful insight is another.