FOLLOW-UP: Monica Gandhi's Pandemic Failures Are Actually Your Fault
Lecherous Profiteering from Trump's War on Science
There's yet another woefully pitiful and inept COVID-19 opinion editorial in The New York Times, surprising no one. Yet the central argument at the core of this latest one is so obscene, it's worth responding to in depth. The author, who we previously profiled in 2023, is none other than the University of California San Francisco's Monica Gandhi. Gandhi is almost impressive in her record as a credentialed academic that managed to find a way to be incorrect in every way imaginable when it comes to COVID-19. Being America, legacies of failure such as this get…rewarded.
A Short History of Monica's Many Mistakes
The COVID-19 pandemic was a brand building opportunity for Monica, who made frequent media appearances downplaying the threat of the virus as it killed and disabled millions of Americans. On the deadliest day of the pandemic in 2021, Monica Gandhi's priority was an "addiction to doom/goom?" and expressed concerned over "doom messengers on TV." In the fall of 2024, she spoke at a Stanford convention that almost exclusively platformed fellow disinformation artists, many of whom now have senior roles in the Trump Administration.
Naturally, Monica opens her opinion editorial by claiming:
“During the pandemic I gained something of a reputation as a so-called COVID contrarian.”
Except this is false - Monica wasn’t simply a contrarian, she was just wrong.
Monica had zero shame advancing the myths of the reactionary anti-vaccine movement, the direct enemy of the entire medical field which she is a part of, and now rather dishonestly continues to do so in the annals of the New York Times. Monica doesn't bother to blame her fellow convention panelists for the disinformation they spread or chaos they're currently causing. She immediately falls back on all her greatest hits, including a bastardization of "harm reduction," all while failing to acknowledge that she constantly underestimated the virus as it killed & disabled millions of Americans. At one point, journalist Medhi Hasan completely humiliated Monica by simply reading her own failed predictions back to her:
This did not change Monica's behavior. Monica Gandhi went on to repeatedly endorse unqualified economist Jay Bhattacharya for NIH Director, predicting on Twitter that he "is going to do a great job as NIH Director and bring stability back to this great medical research funding organization as demoralized at present; he will stabilize the NIH." This would immediately turn out to be yet another failed prediction Monica Gandhi has refused to acknowledge.
Human Sacrifices for Political Capital
After establishing this long history of getting a global disaster dead wrong, Monica sees fit to repeatedly blame everyone else for not treating her elaborate fictions as scientific fact. Before publishing her opinion editorial in the New York Times, Monica tweeted out:
"COVID RESPONSE: Think was political not science based. Don't think Democrat politicians behaved well closing schools as long as they did & not eliciting input from constituents. Does this justify cutting NIH & CDC & attacking science to this extent? NO WAY- hurting the same people."
This is a complete work of fiction.
After COVID-19 killed dozens of educators in a matter of weeks in New York City, remote schooling was implemented in 2020 as an emergency measure, while hospitals were quickly overwhelmed. Monica would have you believe that Republican Donald Trump was not the President when the federal response was a complete disaster, as a number of quacks, such as economist Jay Bhattacharya, flooded the White House & lobbied as hard as they could to get unvaccinated young people infected with a virus they knew nothing about. Monica Gandhi wants to blame the Democrats for this, even after they ensured that tens of millions of unvaccinated children were infected with said virus in Biden's first year as President, killing and disabling many.
Many of these children would bring the SARS-CoV-2 virus home from school, and just what happened next?
Needless to say, there's no such thing as an "apolitical" or purely "science based" pandemic response. Even Monica flip-flopped on the issue of vaccinating children against SARS-CoV-2. Yet did legitimizing the anti-vaccine movement give Monica Gandhi's pleas any credibility? No, of course not. As one of her "fans" replied via the anti-vaccine propaganda network formerly known as Twitter:
"Too late, Monica. The MPH class was wrong about everything and lay people used common sense to call them back and we're ostracized from society. This is payback."
As it turns out, it is a good thing to ostracize anti-vaccine cranks from polite society. Given the chance, they'll do nothing except destroy lifesaving science and put lives at risk. Sadly, Monica refuses to learn this lesson, as she's making a good deal of money to further legitimize such quackery through speaking fees and opinion editorials.
In her well-paid editorial for the New York Times, which doesn't bother to give Monica's article a basic fact-checking, Monica evolves her argument into an especially perverse & indefensible monstrosity:
"Too often during the pandemic, my fellow left-leaning public health experts supported decisions that weren't grounded in science, such as keeping schools closed longer than necessary or enforcing vaccine mandates...I thought those policies would deepen inequalities. But if school closings hurt the poor more than the wealthy during the pandemic, slashing Medicaid will hurt the poor much more."
Ah, yes. If you wanted to protect children, teachers, and families from COVID-19 in any way, it's actually your fault that Medicaid is being slashed and burned.
Monica says educators across America should have gleefully embraced the virus long before a vaccine was available, killing and disabling many of them. Even after COVID-19 has killed hundreds of thousands of parents, Monica thinks that number should have been much higher by infecting them via their children. These noble human sacrifices somehow would have allowed the Democrats to win 2024 and defend American science & medicine, based on logic you can only learn from the Gandhi School of Vibes-Based Epidemiology & Political Capital.
What Monica Gandhi is doing in the New York Times is horrifically insidious: if reactionary anti-vaccine thugs make a loud enough demand, Monica says you should offer it up freely and pray they don't further humiliate you further. Not only is this wrong on moral reasons, but it is also wrong on the facts. There is no level of concessions that will satiate the anti-vaccine movement or other reactionary thugs in their crusade against civil society.
Monica is saying that resisting actually makes you responsible for their actions. This is straight out of The Abusers’ Handbook, filed under the chapter “Gaslighting.”
In Closing
Monica Gandhi's latest diatribe is little more than censorship, directly aligned with the Trump Administration and their rewriting the history of the COVID-19 pandemic. Worse yet, she helps set a precedent that governments have no responsibility to intervene should a future pandemic disaster occurs, and certainly not with any of those darned non-pharmaceutical interventions. Monica Gandhi has completely betrayed every last of her colleagues in medicine, who will be left cleaning up the mess she's helped make. Her priority now? Cashing in.
Yet, as Monica Gandhi goes on her latest media parade, will journalists or the general public be brave enough to confront her with her own record of failure? Honesty and facts are central pillars of civic democracy, which Gandhi played her part in helping to compromise. Now, she wants to pad her wallet by blaming everyone else for not following her lead and cheerfully embracing a deadly and disabling virus in 2020.
This is shameless exploitation and should render Monica persona-non-grata; a footnote in the history textbooks about the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, as an example of the villains who looked at a global disaster and thought: "How can I make this all about me?" Monica Gandhi is so far beyond the realm of science and medicine, way beyond into a deep-seated commitment to propaganda and self-promotion above all else. The public should be treating Monica Gandhi, and those who give her a platform to spew such filth, with the appropriate disgust.
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