Incompetence, Ignorance, and Immaturity
What UCSF's Vinay Prasad teaches us about "living in fear."
Preface
The Biden Administration and CDC are starting the 2023-24 school year by drowning America’s children, their families, and communities in another wave of infectious pestilence, after another mountain of scientific research and pediatric casualties pile up showing that SARS-CoV-2 has debilitating, disabling, and even deadly effects on children. Much of this has been compiled on the Pandemic Accountability Index, and sent to the Surgeron General, CDC Director Mandy Cohen, and other government officials. None have had the courage to admit that their encouragement of mass, repeated infection will kill, orphan, and disable countless more American children between now and July, just in time for the 2024 Democrat National Convention.
Pro-viral advocates with a long record of contrarianism, dishonesty, and even anti-Semitism are openly celebrating this, including frequent fiend of the Pandemic Accountability Index, University of California San Francisco’s Professor Vinay Prasad. Previously, Vinay formed a social media cult around abusing RCTs, he’s self-published junk papers with a quack sports physician and a failed web designer, endorsed anti-Semitic Presidential candidates, fearmongered about pediatric COVID-19 vaccines, and generally been little more than a social media carny for Substack subscription fees and Youtube ad revenue. A complete and total embarrassment for Dean Dr. Talmadge E. King, Jr. and the UCSF administration, whose silence must be considered an endorsement of Prasad’s erratic behavior.
On August 22nd, 2023 Vinay Prasad “quote-tweeted” misogynistic art dealer & social media harassment ringleader Eli Klein, saying thus:
“We will all get many respiratory viruses in our lives. COVID is now like all the others. Living in fear is bad for mental health.”
Incredibly, all three of these sentences are entirely incorrect, in three separate ways - incompetence, ignorance, and immaturity - all of which a serious professional adult needs in a real job - but as a contrarian academic of the UCSF faculty, including pro-viral cranks like Monica Gandhi, it seems to not only be encouraged, but mandated.
I. The Incompetence of UCSF’s Vinay Prasad
“We will all get many respiratory viruses in our lives.”
This is either a blanket lie, or a public admission of complete and total incompetence. According to the CDC (which Prasad baselessly accuses of “unacceptable incompetence”) somewhere between five to twenty percent of Americans are infected with the flu per year. In March 2022, after the Biden Administration crusaded towards “normalcy” in the 2021-22 school year and doubling the child SARS-CoV-2 casualties from 500+ to 1000+ between August and September 2021, it was reported that the majority of America’s children had been infected by SARS-CoV-2.
Now in August 2023, over 2,000+ children are dead and hundreds of thousands, possibly over a million now, have been disabled by Long COVID. Keep that last part in mind for later.
No respiratory virus “like all the others” infects an entire pediatric population in just a couple of years after its emergence, especially in just a few months after dropping any & all mitigations in schools. We are in uncharted territory when it comes to airborne infectious diseases & it’s about time the “experts” admitted this, especially since it means invoking the Precautionary Principle to prevent as many infections as possible, utilizing PPE and other non-pharmaceutical interventions.
UCSF’s Vinay Prasad is either incompetent on the basic epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2 and respiratory viruses, which disqualifies him as a public-facing, self-proclaimed “expert” on the pandemic across social media, or he is willfully dishonest. Either way, both completely disqualify him to serve as faculty at a medical university. Sadly, Prasad’s problems only grow worse from here.
II. The Ignorance of UCSF’s Vinay Prasad
“COVID is now like all the others.”
On top of grave incompetence on the topic of epidemiology, Prasad is delusional enough to insist that COVID-19 is “like all the other” respiratory viruses i.e. cold and flu. The science and casualties that have racked up SARS-CoV-2 is clearly not a simple “respiratory” virus, as a mountain of research in the past year have proven this to be bunk and anyone who claims otherwise is either illiterate or has a dishonest agenda.
The flu and common cold are not found to be the cause of: diabetes, neurologic complications such as seizures, cognitive deficits, autoimmune responses, heart lesions, blood vessel damage, brain abscesses, brain cells to fuse, blood-brain barrier dysfunction, strokes, heart attacks, kidney injury, and reproductive tissue damage. Neither the cold nor the flu, the “respiratory virus” that COVID is “like all the others,” has ever caused erective dysfunction.
UCSF’s Vinay Prasad is either ignorant on the latest research around SARS-CoV-2, which completely disqualifies him as a public-facing, self-proclaimed “expert” on COVID-19 and medical school professor, or he is willfully lying to an audience of largely anti-vax, anti-public health cranks in the pursuit of income - whether it be from right-wing billionaires that support abolishing child labor laws, Substack subscriptions, or Youtube ad revenue - in which he often fearmongers about the safe and effective SARS-CoV-2 vaccine to an audience begging for someone with credentials to validate their anti-scientific delusions & ideologically poisoned adherence to fiction.
In truth, University of California San Francisco’s Vinay Prasad is one of the internet’s largest contributors to ignorance about SARS-CoV-2, and he directly profits from it. As a professor at a prestigious medical institution, there is an incredible amount of responsibility to not mislead their students nor the public. Unfortunately, Vinay Prasad has proven that he is simply not mature enough to be a medical university professor or serve in any academic capacity.
III. The Immaturity of UCSF’s Vinay Prasad
“Living in fear is bad for mental health.”
The pro-viral zealots who seemingly worship SARS-CoV-2 have abused the term “living in fear” time and time again since 2020 as an impressively pitiful catchphrase. UCSF’s Monica Gandhi, WSJ OpEd maniac Marty Makary, anti-vax “homeopath” Leslie Manookian & every last one of the sheep being herded into the slaughterhouse of the libertarian billionaire crusade against public health’s very existence all love to accuse those taking SARS-CoV-2 seriously, after millions globally have died, of the character flaw that is “living in fear.”
You know what’s bad for your mental health? Realizing that a “respiratory virus” you were told is “like all the others” has left you disabled or even bedridden. Long COVID has disabled millions of Americans, with scientists around the world like David Putrino of the Putrino Lab struggling to understand, treat, and hopefully one day cure this condition. This medical calamity is a new & horrifying part of our reality, with countless newly disabled people taking to social media to advocate for themselves - often facing abuse and harassment for warning the public of what SARS-CoV-2 does.
One of the requirements of being a mature adult with professional responsibilities is learning to accept when facts contradict your personal beliefs and adjust accordingly. Many people were misled to believe that a cloth or surgical mask was sufficient protection against the airborne SARS-CoV-2 virus, because kids don’t grow up learning about PPE engineering in grade school. When it became more widely understood that SARS-CoV-2 is airborne, mature adults upgraded to N95 respirators, engineered by companies like 3M to serve as airborne PPE.
As Long COVID disability has grown much more widespread, Vinay Prasad’s claims that SARS-CoV-2 is “like all the other” cold and flu “respiratory viruses” has utterly fallen apart, and encouraging endless reinfections is abhorrent and immature medical advice from a university professor. So how has Vinay Prasad reacted to this new, factual information? Did he act like a mature adult and swallow his pride for once? Issue an apology to his many social media followers for misleading them? Let’s take a quick peek at his YouTube channel…
No, Vinay Prasad did not act like a mature adult with professional responsibilities as a faculty member of the University of California San Francisco. Instead, he chose to boost & publish fraudulent papers, broadcast poor conclusions, blame the vaccine, and worst of all - openly engage in slander and incite harassment of working scientists actually doing research, instead of hiding behind a screen and acting like a cheap heat carny on social media for money.
Instead, Vinay Prasad has dedicated himself to being a Long COVID “debunker,” as that’s what his social media audience craves and it serves to confirm his preformed beliefs that SARS-CoV-2, after killing and disabling millions around the world, is “like all the other” “respiratory viruses” that “we will all get many times.” Why admit that you were wrong about this incredibly serious medical issue when you could just further detach yourself from reality?
This is the core of “living in fear.” Fear of guilt, of shame, of feeling bad that you got things wrong. Denial is a well-documented psychological response to fear, grief, and trauma. Fear that we’re actually living through a scary situation? Grief that we all could have done a lot more to prevent needless disability? The trauma of losing revenue from Social media platforms like Twitter and Youtube, or losing revenue from a rightoid billionaire who believe teenage girls should drop out of school, don a Hooters uniform, and smoke Virginia Slims on their soon-to-be-outlawed union mandated shift breaks? Way more terrifying than being disabled by a virus.
Worse, UCSF Professor Vinay Prasad has lashed out against researchers who are actually trying to struggle and understand Long COVID disability, calling working scientists “entirely ignorant.” Mind you, Vinay Prasad has his own laboratory named after himself, funded by an ex-Enron crook seeking to destroy public education and deploy surveillance drones on city streets.
Vinay Prasad’s slander of Putrino & other Long COVID researchers didn’t end there, neither - painting the entire field of Long COVID research as a “total grift,” with zero facts or evidence to back this outrageous claim up. However, it was very popular with his anti-vax, denialist audience, so nobody bothered to engage critically and realize Vinay was yet again completely full of himself. Vinay doubles down, and makes further accusations against Putrino:
Now understand that Vinay Prasad is a professor at the University of California San Francisco, publicly accusing David Putrino and his laboratory of defrauding the National Institute of Health and demanding they return the funding. Prasad provides no evidence for this accusation. Is this acceptable behavior for an academic or medical professional to make publicly, inciting his audience to harass and abuse David Putrino, in any capacity? Perhaps UCSF Dean Talmadge King can clarify.
One of Vinay Prasad’s abrasive Twitter buddies is art dealer Eli Klein, whose original claim to fame was on the show Gallery Girls, in which he is shown to abuse and exploit unpaid female interns for years. This misogyny isn’t limited to trashy reality television, as Eli Klein frequently incites harassment and abuse against disabled women suffering from Long COVID disability, publicly accusing them of fraud and lying for clout, encouraging his rabid followers to harass these women into silence. Any doctor who thinks a creep like Klein is somebody worth associating with - thinking a sadistic art dealer is in any place to “make sure that none of my tax money is going to this delusional NYC long Covid lab.” - has zero place in any medical setting.
This is a prime example of two men so crippled by fear of a new disease and the disability it causes that they feed into one another’s crippling denial in pursuit of social media clout. With zero facts or evidence their accusations grow further and further detached from scientific reality & ultimately are projections of their own failings to make a valuable contribution during this ongoing crisis.
Childish, pitiful immaturity enabled & emboldened by social media trolls. What medical students will actually learn from UCSF Professor Vinay Prasad is how to comically embarrass yourself, ultimately leaving behind a legacy of nothing more than all of humanity’s worst qualities. The history books that will be written about the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic will mention Vinay Prasad as little more than a footnote example of one of the many worthless saboteurs with a zealous loyalty to a mindless virus & the countless harms it caused.
Imagine living your life so dominated by fear that you were wrong, that you end up wasting years publicly doubling down on ignorance, incompetence, and immaturity.
Why is a dangerous crank like Prasad allowed to remain at a public institution supported by my tax dollars?