Professional Jealousy in Pandemic Mismanagement
Where Are My Awards? Where Are My Accolades?
First off, just wanted to give a shout-out to Dr. Jeremy Faust over at Inside Medicine, who has been doing great reporting on Trump's unfolding war against public health, in what can be best described as a total brain drain of much-needed doctors, scientists, and public health workers in the federal government. Definitely go read up on what he has to say.
Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.
The Pandemic as Blockbuster
Imagine you're at the movie theater watching a new film about the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, set in a Manhattan hospital. ICUs and morgues are being overwhelmed, while freezer trucks and mass graves are being deployed. Patients are dying on ventilators, and it's a dour scene of doctors & nurses filing in and out of patient rooms, struggling to save lives. This is what actually happened.
Now the camera pans to the left, and we see a Stanford economist dashing through the hall, one arm swinging in front of the other in slow-motion. Dramatic pings match every stomp of the feet across the linoleum tiles, and a cinematic transition to mood lighting establishes a grim atmosphere.
Sweat dripping from his brow, our protagonist stops in the middle of a crowded ICU ward, and pulls a stack of papers from his blazer, exclaiming, "I have produced a body of research to deter future public health tyrants!" (This is what UCSF's Vinay Prasad has said to describe Stanford economist Jay Bhattacharya's agenda is if confirmed as NIH director.) In dramatic fashion, the healthcare workers all file out of the ICU and surround this brave economist, clapping & cheering. "You did it, Jay! You solved the pandemic!" Meanwhile in the background, yet another COVID-19 patient in the ICU struggles to take their last breath; the chilling ping of the heartbeat monitor going flat as the camera fades to black and credits roll.
Obviously, this is ridiculous.
The point of this absurd movie pitch is simple: In the early days of 2020, some people were just a little more useful than others in what sort of contributions they could make. Poll a hundred people off the street at random, Family Feud style, and ask them what sort of professions are most useful in a pandemic disaster, and you'll likely hear "doctor," "nurse," "vaccine scientist," or perhaps "PPE manufacturer," with "economist" being very low on that list, if at all. This isn't something to be ashamed of, as we all walk different paths in life.
Unfortunately, we had the media spotlight hogged by economist academics who produced rather useless and shoddy work - Emily Oster's tech billionaire funded Substack was used to lobby for COVID-19 outbreaks in schools that killed, harmed, and orphaned many children, for example. Dr. Bob Morris has written an extensive breakdown of Stanford economist Jay Bhattacharya's failed seroprevalence study from 2020 that committed numerous basic errors to sell SARS-CoV-2 as harmless and beneficial, misleading much of the general public into underestimating the virus.
These economists were nowhere to be found treating patients in the ICU, with others left to clean up their mess.
While frontline healthcare workers were initially celebrated and honored as heroes, and rightfully so, it left certain people engaging in a bit of professional jealously as they sat on their couch, doing the most useful thing they could at the time - not getting and spreading COVID-19 around their community - and wondering... well, where are my accolades? Why am I not being celebrated as a hero? Or worse, in the case of Emily Oster: why am I being expected to raise my own children in the midst of an unfolding disaster? This led to some rather... nasty attitudes and unprofessional misconduct, such as economist Oster declaring that the latest medical research documenting COVID-19's negative impacts on pediatric health were all "bad," smearing scientists researching a new virus as incompetent.
When John Ioannidis' rosy-eyed predictions of COVID-19 killing less Americans than the flu were immediately debunked in a matter of weeks by New Yorkers dying of COVID-19, Ioannidis started seeding a conspiracy theory that it wasn't COVID-19 killing people, but instead nefarious or incompetent doctors who were intubating patients willy-nilly, condemning them to an early grave. It didn't matter if this grave accusation was true or supported by evidence, it mattered that Ioannidis got to save face, even if it meant demonizing doctors and nurses who were struggling to save lives. John would go on to fearmonger about the COVID-19 vaccine and sing the praises of SARS-CoV-2 as harmless and benign.
This made him very popular in conservative & contrarian media, even if his claims were false. His rising star was more important than keeping Americans alive.
A Culture of Outrage Farming
These attitudes have only spiraled out of control in the years that have followed. People who were totally useless, or otherwise limited in their ability to contribute in the fight against COVID-19, began to profit from painting a broad brush of outlandish accusations against doctors, nurses, public health officials, and scientists that are not made in good faith, and are designed to intimidate, silence, and yes, censor actual medical and scientific experts who can help prevent deaths caused by SARS-CoV-2 and other diseases with an unyielding tirade of death threats, smears, and half-cocked screeching and wailing.
The medical profession has essentially become a punching bag for people who are too ashamed to admit that they wasted the past five years doing little more than producing utterly worthless social media content. Jay Bhattacharya's online petition doesn't keep anyone out the hospital and doesn't help the countless healthcare workers he's pitifully branded as "Covidians." (PAI) A failed web designer from Georgia, Kelley Krohnert, falsely claimed she was "fact-checking the CDC" whilst smugly declaring that pediatric COVID-19 deaths weren't happening and shouldn't be prevented in any way. A (now expelled) medical student from Texas, Kevin Bass, goes on Tucker Carlson and declares that the entire medical community are all incompetent, (PAI) and that we should have been mass infecting children and their families with SARS-CoV-2 in spring 2020.
This was all pretty shameful misconduct.
Doctors and nurses aren't the only ones under attack, either. Journalist Ed Yong, who's done essential reporting on Long COVID, has been smeared and personally attacked by those like Benjamin Ryan, desperate to raise their own profile by tearing down others. Scientist Ziyad Al-Aly, who is doing critical research on the long-term effects of COVID-19, has been slandered and smeared in all sorts of different ways - even by sociologist & New York Times contributor Zeynep Tufekci, who has long been desperate to minimize Long COVID's scale and promote herself as the real hero to the millions of Americans left disabled by "mild" COVID-19 infections. Dr. Peter Hotez, who developed a lifesaving, patent-free COVID-19 vaccine, has faced a relentless torrent of abuse and personal attacks from all corners of the modern anti-vaccine movement, including from credentialed academics like Vinay Prasad of UCSF.
Team Sport Mentality in COVID-19 Disinformation
At some point, you begin smearing with such a broad brush that you start to lose all coherence. One could sit here and make a list of every institution, organization, and individual that UCSF's Vinay Prasad has lashed out at on social media over the years, with all sorts of obscene vulgarities, that it has devolved into nonsensical rambling.
Do you seriously believe someone like Dr. Jeremy Faust was sitting in the break room with his fellow healthcare workers in February 2020 plotting a corrupt, tyrannical “Covidian” takeover of American society, denying an entire generation of youth their education? Nurses performing dance routines on TikTok to keep each other's morale up were lying about what they saw in the ICU? That someone like Peter Hotez has been pivotal in a conspiracy to murder countless millions of Americans with a poison mRNA vaccine, and FEMA is covering up mass graves all across the nation? Unfortunately, certain people decided they would start treating the pandemic like an episode of The X-Files, and certain credentialed professionals chose to enable these fantasies, completely detached from reality, in order to promote themselves as the real heroes of the pandemic.
It's all quite embarrassing at the end of the day. Instead of honoring and celebrating heroes that made serious, lifesaving contributions and sacrifices in the fight against COVID-19 - they have been unfairly maligned as tyrannical villains, incompetent fools, or any other insult under the sun that has contributed to a torrent of abuse, harassment, threats, and yes, violence. All of this to promote people who have absolutely zero contributions to make. You're never going to hear someone like Jay Bhattacharya praise someone like the volunteers for randomized control trials to evaluate COVID-19 vaccines, ensuring that they are safe and effective for public use, because voices like Jay are only interested in promoting themselves, and those on their team, no matter how wrong they get things.
For example, a failed 2023 meta-analysis of PPE in Cochrane cherry-picked studies, committed basic statistical errors, and conflated airborne & droplet disease transmission. The results were inconclusive. This didn't stop any number of COVID-19 contrarian voices from running with this paper & falsely smearing COVID-19 PPE as ineffective. What those who have championed this paper concealed from their audience is even more damning. One of the authors, Carl Heneghan, was advising the UK government in September 2020 to let COVID-19 burn (The Times) through the nation, just months before a vaccine was available. This is a pretty basic conflict of interest: Carl wanted people infected with COVID-19 as early as the Summer of 2020, so of course he's going to malign PPE as ineffective. That compromises his credibility and the legitimacy of this paper. However, it aligned with the contrarian team's view that PPE doesn't work, so they smugly chose to broadcast their own willful ignorance.
Closing Thoughts
What this all comes down to is that the loudest voices who have unleashed a torrent of insults and slander since 2020 are doing so from a place of insecurity. They know they produce sloppy work designed solely to validate their previously formed conclusions. Their arguments don't carry water against the facts and rendered totally naked by those who have actual responsibilities in the real world, are left to resort to personal attacks & slander. In the largest mass death event in American history, certain voices have had little to offer in the way of help. Instead of doing the respectful thing and quietly getting out of the way at the very least, they decided that doctors, nurses, public health officials, and scientists needed to be relentlessly attacked and humiliated in order to elevate & promote themselves as the real heroes of COVID-19.
Over at Science Based Medicine, Dr. Jonathan Howard makes a crucial point:
By using such immature slurs and childish images, [Jay Bhattacharya] is trying to drive a wedge between us and our patients, telling them that we are untrustworthy and that we, not the virus, are to blame for everything they didn’t like about the pandemic.
It's incredibly easy to jump on Substack, Twitter, or Youtube and smugly shrug your shoulders to say we shouldn't lift a finger to prevent COVID-19 deaths, or attack healthcare workers with expletive filled screeds making obscene, evidence-free accusations. It's quite difficult to save a COVID-19 patient in an ICU or develop a lifesaving vaccine in a laboratory. Shamefully, the former is being celebrated over the latter by many, especially at leading institutions like Stanford University. (PAI)
We as a society should be openly rejecting this garbage, instead of letting it fester in critical institutions such as the halls of the federal government or medical universities. One need not foolishly pretend these abusive contrarians were legitimate voices that needed a spotlight and a platform free from criticism. America is bound to pay a heavy price if we fail to reverse this course.
