A Slice of Satire: Let's Banish PPE from Hospitals
A Health Economist Approach to Maximalizing Patient Satisfaction
On February 6th 2024, on the dying social media platform that is Twitter, Stanford "health economist" and face of the Great Barrington Declaration Jay Bhattacharaya (DrJBhattacharya) retweeted anti-vax grifter Harry Fisher (HopiNg66966500), who oh so boldly claimed that:
"I have seen fearful healthcare providers watch as people are dying just to they can put on their masks, gloves, and gowns. Which takes so much time. We know hearts and minds require oxygen. People are so afraid. WHO pushed that fear? Who harmed us this way?"
Later on in this thread, Fisher would claim, in response to evidence that the COVID-19 vaccine is safe and effective:
"Anyone who trusts the cdc at this point would literally walk a Jew into a gas chamber and pretend it's just a shower."
Stanford academic Smilin' Jay Bhattacharya would not rescind his endorsement of Fisher's statements nor rebuke this obnoxiously anti-Semitic comment. Fisher has also previously called for public executions and posted other sadistic, violent fantasies, something the Great Barrington Declaration is not unfamiliar with. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford Medicine thinks that someone like Harry Fisher, and his violent, anti-Semitic ramblings, is someone worth endorsing and giving a larger platform to - a grossly irresponsible violation of Stanford Medicine's Code of Conduct.
However, on the flip side, we all know that the fields of medicine, infectious diseases, and PPE engineering are not scientific at all - economics is the only true scientific field and is solely qualified to evaluate all other academic, "laptop class" fields such as public health. So just what is a health economist mindset to PPE in hospitals?
A “Cost-Benefit Analysis” to Banish PPE from Hospitals
According to AHA.Org, there are 6,120 hospitals in the US, with 916,752 staffed beds. There are approximately 1.1 million professionally active physicians, with over 4.6 million active nurses currently working in America. Give or take, that means there are over 5.5 million active healthcare workers in America. If you start to add up the seconds spent donning gloves, gowns, and *gasp* respirators, then it's pretty easy to watch the wasted potential for maximalized revenue add up - the sole metric of which one can scientifically evaluate the effectiveness of a privatized healthcare system.
It's long past time for healthcare executives & administrators to step in, enforce the science, and banish any form of PPE from healthcare settings. The precious seconds wasted keeping doctors and nurses from treating patients simply are not justified under a rigorous cost-benefit analysis. The millions of dollars budgeted to procure and maintain PPE stockpiles for frontline doctors and nurses would be must better spent rewarding the hardworking executives, administrators, and shareholders who every day roll up their sleeves and keep America's trusted healthcare providers generating the record profits that prove the United States has the world's greatest healthcare system known to mankind.
Now, protests about patient safety in healthcare settings by radical "keep people alive" activists may be cause for concern, but rest assured, we've flooded the internet with dozens of bunk scientific papers from those with zero qualifications in PPE engineering to confuse the public. These quack publications will inspire misleading headlines across the press and have no fear, knowing that the public will not think highly enough of themselves to read these junk papers, nobody will think twice that they're possibly being bamboozled.
As far as nosocomial infections for airborne diseases are concerned, we've succeeded in restructuring the public into "normal, health citizens" and "vulnerable" cohorts. If a patient dies of a nosocomial SARS-CoV-2 infection, they were simply "vulnerable," and their profitability greatly hampered by their inferior health conditions. If a patient survives a nosocomial SARS-CoV-2 infection, we were simply cashing out their remaining "immunity debt" from the dastardly lockdowns of Spring 2020 - and luckily, the public has yet to question their "new normal" of constant illness now in at the end of winter 2024.
What Does This Mean for Healthcare Workers?
The health and well-being of our doctors and nurses is our number one-priority as health economists. However, we also understand through stringent cost-benefit analysis that the long-term illness taking healthcare workers out of the workforce via conditions such as Long COVID, as a result of failing to provide adequate PPE for an airborne pandemic, signals the need for a new approach and the transition of inferior stock out of the labor force. For the cost a of a single practicing doctors' salary, hospital administrators can employ at least three Nurse Practitioners or Physician Associates, commonly referred to as "Noctors." If one NP is out with a CVD-19 reinfection, there's now multiple pairs of hands to cover the gap in care - and with the evolution of ChatGPT tailored to clinical purposes, modern hospital settings can finally automate specialized knowledge!
Now, you're probably concerned about the moral and ethical ramifications of demanding high-turnover in healthcare settings to optimize patient-care efficiency ratios. Thankfully, we've developed a solution with leading health economist Jay Bhattacharya of The Brownstone Institute, a controversial anti-vaccine, anti-public health outlet (owned by a neo-Confederate billionaire -Ed.) that has developed a bold new training program for young recruits to healthcare providers: "You Serve The Public, Not The Other Way Around."
Our bold new "accept exposure" keynote series, inspired by the same campaigns to dissuade unionization efforts at leading retailers like Amazon or fast-foot chains, imprints the expectations of self-sacrifice that the next generation of healthcare workers will be expected to carry forth when maximalizing patient outcomes-to-profit ratios. As Jay Bhattacharya famously declared, "public health is for the laptop class," and healthcare workers need to prioritize serving the public over their own selfish desires of self-preservation; the inevitable consequence of refusing to abolish Humanities education mandates.
As we work to automate the human experience into a profitability spectrum, optimizing health outcomes to center on maximalizing returns on investment, we're thankful that you can join us in taking the next grand step in realizing this vision by joining the call to abolish PPE in healthcare delivery facilities.
...You can probably tell that I used to write advertising copy.
These 950+ words sound extreme, and certainly are the result of taking an obscene conclusion from anti-vax cranks to their natural end, but this is the sort of mentality that has become dominant in discourse about public health - the bastardization of the term "cost-benefit analysis" when no CBA is ever performed, the idea that a laptop class economist had any qualifications to evaluate how SARS-CoV-2 could cause serious harms in children, the raving against PPE standards to keep not only doctors and nurses, but their patients safe in healthcare settings: the onslaught against the very ideal of personal responsibility to larger society.
Anyways, we are now facing pediatric measle outbreaks nationwide, in due part to the same Florida government that has employed Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya in the past. It sure would be a damned shame if anyone who contributed to rising anti-vaccine sentiments and encouraged reckless disregard for child illness faced accountability before America records a pediatric measles death in 2024!
On a personal note, I wanted to extend a thanks to everyone who has financially supported the Pandemic Accountability Index since the fall of 2022. While my personal life is undergoing serious turmoil and financial precarity over the next few weeks, your help has been a boon in keeping my head above water. I only hope you've enjoyed the Pandemic Accountability Index over this long hook of the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and support our coverage of bad actors regarding future outbreaks.