PROFILE: UCSF's Vinay Prasad
PROFILE: UCSF's Vinay Prasad
Decoding SARS-CoV-2's Most Dedicated Poster
Vinay Prasad a professor of Epidemiology & Biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco and is funded by Arnold Ventures, the private investment fund created by ex-Enron hedge fund billionaire John Arnold. Before Enron's downfall in 2001, John Arnold gave himself an $8 million dollar bonus for the sheer genius of committing financial crimes. Arnold Ventures lobbies for making hospitals more profitable by cutting care, as well as putting surveillance drones on American streets. Its logo is featured prominently on the webpage for Vinay Prasad's self-titled "laboratory." On top of this, Vinay Prasad has also been paid handsomely by Jeffrey Tucker, a neo-Confederate billionaire who is a strong advocate for child labor and teenage smoking habits.
Most of these quotes are from Vinay Prasad’s Twitter account, VPrasadMDMPH, unless stated otherwise. Hence, the frequent typos and grammar errors are of Prasad’s own rushing to post his “hot takes.” We will also be subjecting you to the many inflammatory thumbnails from Vinay Prasad’s Youtube channel, in this multi-year review of Vinay Prasad’s endless advocacy for SARS-CoV-2 infections.
2015
Vinay Prasad publishes a book in which he writes "But the truth is, a randomized [control] trial can only be done, ethically, if there is real uncertainty as to which is better, the treatment or the placebo." Rest assured; this will quickly become incredibly relevant in just a handful of years.
2017
A 2017 Statnews profile of Vinay Prasad is incredibly revealing for what would follow. Emphasis mine.
“[Prasad] credits his entrance into the medical field to his college roommate...He was taking the MCAT, so Prasad decided to try out the medical entrance exam out himself. 'I don't know if I would have signed up on my own volition'...He hated the first two years of medical school...which involves hours upon hours of basic science lectures. He even considered quitting: 'I couldn't stand the rote memorization of things that seemed so useless."
"Prasad is concerned that there are too many false positives...tests turn up cancer that does not really need to be treated"
"Prasad takes that fury as proof that many doctors are too concerned with making money to follow the evidence where it leads" [This will become incredibly relevant later on.]
"Prasad is putting too much weight on statistical tables, instead of listening to the real-world experience of real-life patients and physicians. They also dismiss him as a generalist who doesn't really understand the specialty fields he so angrily attacks - and doesn't try to.
'He never wanted to hear the other side...there's an absolutism to his voice"
"[Prasad] also complains that too many trials aren't gold-standard, random controlled studies"
"Roughly one day a week, Prasad pulls on his white coat and walks over to the university hospital, where he treats patients"
With a real-world crisis, Vinay Prasad had an opportunity to put his perspective into action. He chose to spend the following years lining his own pockets ranting from behind the safety of a screen, rather than actually saving lives. In fact, he would frequently lash out at the doctors with real-world responsibility that chose the latter.
2020
04.27.2020 - For STAT News, Vinay publishes the article "Scientists Who Express Different Views on COVID-19 Should Be Heard, Not Demonized" defending disgraced "expert" Dr. John Ioannidis who predicted SARS-CoV-2 would only kill 10,000 Americans "in the same ballpark as seasonal influenza." Prasad has never abandoned this view that SARS-CoV-2 is little more than a minor flu virus, and would frequently attack any evidence that proved his opinion was a delusional fiction.
Vinay Prasad would go on to demonize public health and frequently spew out vile, personal insults as well as wild accusations for his own personal profit. As the social media revenue from his performance as a dedicated pro-viral contrarian grew, his behavior would grow further unprofessional, sadistic, and not at all based in science - demonizing scientists that expressed a view different from Prasad’s.
05.16.2020 - Prasad tweets "Our issue is that if academic disagreement gets so personal and so political, we are doomed. It's worse than Covid. Stanford authors deserve to have their study gutted, but not the personal attacks. That is a slippery slope even if they go on bad TV shows."
09.07.2020 - "I hope we can be better than the vaccine fearmongerers." Vinay Prasad would quickly become a vaccine fearmongerer just months later, profiting greatly from it. University of California, San Francisco would refuse to condemn this shameless breach of medical ethics and entertain his social media antics.
10.16.2020 - Prasad takes out an OpEd in MedPageToday, titled: "Great Barrington vs Jon Snow Is a False Choice - Should whomever gets the most signatures decide our fate?" Prasad would go on to nakedly endorse the GBD and drowning your children in pestilence. He never actually cared about upholding the legacy of Mr. Snow, instead choosing to proudly broadcast that he knows nothing.
12.11.2020 - Prasad begins raging against the whipping boy of every conservative, teachers’ unions: "teachers unions have revealed themselves to be akin to police unions-- so concerned with the short-term interests of their constituents (even irrationally so)-- they ignore their own long term interests, and kids interests"
Vinay Prasad ends 2020 laying the foundations for what will follow, blaming teachers for refusing to throw their health & lives away for the sole purpose of watching children get sicker and sicker with a new disease that has already killed so many educators and disrupting “normalcy.” Even worse, Prasad will play incredibly recklessly with children’s health, using the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to minimize pediatric COVID deaths as evidence that children aren’t harmed by SARS-CoV-2.
2021
01.08.2021 - "The schools that are open are not based on scientific factors (rate of transmission/ hospitalization), but by political factors (do they hate trump - close; strong unions - closed) The mantra used is that schools are a threat to kids and teachers." Prasad, who claims to be a "Sanders fan" will spend an incredible amount of time ranting about teachers' unions whilst publishing on far-right platforms.
01.13.2021 - "The virus meanwhile is thank god not that bad for most healthy kids, on par with seasonal influenza. Even the rate of multi-inflammatory syndrome is vanishingly low.--although you wouldn't know that from the breathless news coverage and tweets."
Anti-Vax - "Let me be perfectly clear: children DO NOT NEED a sars-cov-2 vaccine before they are permitted to return to normal activities, such as school and visiting loved ones. Any claims to the contrary are demoralizing and counter to common sense and medicine."
02.03.2021 - Anti-Vax - For STAT News, Vinay Prasad publishes an opinion editorial claiming "Kids don't need COVID-19 vaccines to return to school." With only a year into a pandemic dealing with a brand new virus, Vinay Prasad argued that infecting unvaccinated children with SARS-CoV-2 would not negatively affect their health or education. Even if no children died of COVID-19, children are constantly surrounded by adults whether that be parents or teachers. Many of these adults would die because they were infected by a child carrying SARS-CoV-2; hundreds of thousands in America alone, as a matter of fact.
Let nobody pretend that Vinay Prasad has not used social media to profit from self-promotion as an anti-vaccine influencer & crusader against public health, as that now makes up his entire audience these days across social media platforms including Substack and Youtube. The fact that the University of California, San Francisco has not disavowed and dismissed Prasad's relentless crusade, under the cowardice of Dean Talmadge King, is a damning mark against UCSF's reputation.
02.04.2021 - Anti-Vax - Before a single child was vaccinated, Prasad argued on a podcast against vaccinating kids for COVID-19 by claiming: "SARS-CoV-2 is...maybe even less severe than influenza, seasonal influenza in kids." Prasad would go on to argue that the CDC was publishing fraudulent pediatric death records via alleged typos, with the help of failed web designer and Substack grifter Kelley Krohnert. Oddly enough, Vinay Prasad has a bizarre habit of manufacturing evidence to support his opinions after they're proven false, the precise opposite of the scientific method.
02.13.2021 - Hosting Dr. John Ioannidis on his podcast Plenary Session, Prasad refused to rebuke John’s delusional conspiracy theory that ventilators were what killed COVID-19 patients in hospitals, and not the deadly & disabling virus that Ioannidis was frequently gravely wrong about. Vinay Prasad, a crusader for "Evidence Based Medicine," did not demand any evidence for this claim. In truth, John Ioannidis experienced the pandemic from his couch, and saw fit to accuse frontline doctors and nurses of manslaughter.
03.23.2021 - While SARS-CoV-2 remains the leading infectious disease killer of children, Prasad insisted from the start that "Kids btw age 5-14 are 10 times more likely to die of suicide in a typical year than COVID19 in the last one. School closure for sars-cov-2 is the worst policy idea imaginable; it has to stop." Of course, Prasad has never advocated doing anything to prevent pediatric suicides, he solely exploits child suicides to justify the mass infection of children with SARS-CoV-2. Prasad will frequently abuse pediatric suicides to justify shrugging off pediatric COVID-19 deaths, a common logical fallacy that shouldn't fly in any serious medical or academic setting.
04.21.2021 - "Omg. 2020 was the year, I knew without a doubt that teachers unions could care less about student interests." All because unvaccinated teachers weren't willing to throw away their lives in the face of a deadly & disabling virus. Prasad will in the years that follow, double down on his crusade to destroy public education and teachers' unions, just like his far-right libertarian billionaire masters demand of him.
05.07.2021 - Anti-Vax - Prasad, alongside Great Barrington Declaration advisor Stefan Baral, publishes an opinion editorial in BMJ titled "COVID vaccines for chidlren should not get emergency use authorization." Assuming COVID-19 was simply influenza as early as 2020, Prasad's views were never changed by the mountains of death, disability, and scientific research that followed. Prasad has never apologized for getting this wrong.
05.14.2021 - Vinay Prasad alongside John Mandrola publishes an article titled "Setting the record straight: There is no 'COVID Heart'" insisting that COVID-19, a vascular disease, can not cause any serious harms to the organ that pumps blood throughout your vascular system. Mountains of scientific research since has proven that this was simply untrue, and Prasad has never apologized for this grave misguidance.
07.23.2021 - Anti-Vax - Vinay Prasad began growing his audience by fearmongering about miyocarditis and the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, arguing against a full vaccine series by claiming, "I don't think people realize the damage continuing to push two doses in young men will do." As it turns out, these fears were largely unfounded and utterly delusional, thankfully. Prasad never apologized for his evidence-free fearmongering.
08.16.21 - Vinay Prasad mocked journalist Tara Helle, claiming "Good journalism apparently starts with the theory that doctors pro school opening are killing kids and working backwards from there." Thanks to the Biden Administration's crusade for "normalcy," the pediatric death toll from SARS-CoV-2 would double from over 500 in August to over 1,000 before Christmas. Many parents died because their child brought home the virus from school. It's worth noting that Vinay Prasad has a bizarre focus on women who support public health, taking a tone that is incredibly mocking and condescending - typical in the misogyny that is rife throughout academia & medicine.
The “Public Health is Nazism” Debacle
10.02.2021 - For Substack, Vinay publishes an article titled "How Democracy Ends," comparing COVID-19 public health precautions to the fascist regime of Nazi Germany. This incredibly anti-Semitic & highly inappropriate comparison was widely condemned across the medical field, all the while countless Americans were dying and being disabled thanks to SARS-CoV-2 infections. Tufts University GSBS Dean Daniel Jay publicly disavowed these comments as well. Prasad insisted that comparing public health mandates to the Nazis that systemically exterminated of millions of Jews and others, including the disabled, was not at all anti-Semitic.
It’s worth nothing that this is directly playing into “No New Normal” and other far-right anti-vax conspiracy theorists, pandering to these cranks in order to grow Prasad’s social media following whilst demonizing scientists and public health. Medical professionals with real-world responsibilities would reply:
“This isn’t a thing piece, it’s an audition to be the Surgeon General of QAnon. Devoid of empathy. Ignorant of public health. Bad faith arguments. Expendable kids. Antisemitism. What a shit show.” -Jennifer Gunter @DrJenGunter
10.08.2021 - An article is published on The Cancer Letter titled: “Did Vinay Prasad need to mention the Nazis to make a point on the U.S. pandemic response? Vinay Prasad might well have made his contrarian points without invoking the specter of the Third Reich. He didn’t have to go there—but he did. Voluntarily.”
11.07.2021 - Vinay Prasad claims he is a "progressive, Bernie Sanders fan." Oddly enough, Vinay Prasad would become a frequent writer for the far-right "Brownstone Institute," owned by neo-Confederate Jeffrey Tucker, who champions child labor and teen smoking. For this neo-Confederate owned far-Right Brownstone Institute, Vinay Prasad writes an article accusing COVID "Fact checkers" of dishonesty and manipulation via fearmongering, that these people could not be trusted.
Contrasted with last year, when Prasad called for decorum & civility in defense of frequently wrong and conspiratorial crank John Ioannidis, 2021's Vinay Prasad would frequently lash out and make evidence free allegations without restraint. As his social media followers grew as well as the personal revenue, 2021 Prasad's commitment to scientific truth was quickly abandoned. Sadly, he did not resign from the University of California, San Francisco out of respect for the institution and academic colleagues, to focus on his true priority: medical quackery.
2022
Prasad at this point has fully abandoned any commitment to medical ethics and scientific rigor and gone full pro-viral contrarian. With nothing worthwhile to contribute, Prasad will spend 2022 going on the attack against anyone and everyone - including those suffering from Long COVID. On top of this, Prasad will cross over from the medical field & declare himself an expert on engineering science & aerosol transmission. The narcissism and dishonesty truly go over the top here, and it's reinforced by Prasad blocking almost the entirety of his medical colleagues on social media who correct his nonsense - fermenting a dangerous echo chamber that misleads his social media following into thinking Vinay is some sort of thought leader in the field of medical science.
To quote Taylor Nichols, MD from January 2022: "Vinay Prasad now writes for the Brownstone Institute, which was founded last year by Jeffery Tucker, who is the editorial director of AIER, which receives money from the Charles Koch Foundation and Emergent Order, which is a PR firm funded by Charles Koch...and which brought us the Great Barrington Declaration, which postulated that we only need "focused protection" of the vulnerable, along with anti-vaccine and anti-mask sentiment, which would have likely led to significantly increased death and disability from this pandemic...Stop paying attention to what the contrarians are saying to get attention and start paying attention to the money and politics that are supporting them."
01.02.2022 - Prasad kicks off the new year by admitting that he's long been a dedicated crusader to destroy public education: "Every school distract not open tomorrow has failed it's kids and society. Public schools will need total reform/replacement in the future. Vouchers/charter are coming. Teachers unions destroyed a generation. As a life long liberal, it was sad to watch."
01.06.2022 - Days later, Prasad jumps on Twitter to do what he frequently accuses others of: fearmongering. "If a four, give or six-year-old falls asleep wearing an n95 mask and something bad happens....We should all be very clear on who we're going to litigate." Prasad will frequently argue for lawsuits against child PPE manufacturers, instead of suggesting anything to prevent the needless pediatric COVID deaths that have happened in years past and the years to follow. This carny hackery exists solely to perform for his audience of anti-mask, anti-vax cranks on social media.
01.13.2022 - Prasad claims "Despite doing everything right every person on the planet will be exposed to, and infected with, the virus. Testing without symptoms is no longer useful. Quarantining cohorts or classes who feel fine is not useful. Disruptions r a self inflicted wound." None of these statements are true - these bad outcomes are the result of terrible policy choices that Prasad has campaigned for, for starters. The number of logical fallacies here is astounding, and yet, nearly two years later, Vinay Prasad cannot stop talking about "the virus" that he insists everyone must forget about.
Insisting that infectious students go on to get their teachers, fellow students, and families of them sick with COVID-19, which has already killed and disabled so many, is nothing but sadistic and cruel. What Prasad really cares about is forcing everyone else to entertain his delusion that nothing is wrong, and he continues to double down on this pitiful approach throughout 2022.
01.19.2022 - The self-proclaimed "progressive Bernie fan" publishes an Op-ed in the right-wing City Journal titled "Public Health's Truth Problem" to argue that American public health was being dishonest in their response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Epidemiologist Lynn Schaffer thoroughly debunked it for Science Based Medicine, declaring he "leans heavily on pushing people's emotional hot buttons." This exchange made it to Prasad's Wikipedia page as a permanent stain on his credibility. Lynn Schaffer concludes:
“I hear the word ‘fearmongering’ a lot. It’s always followed by a different form of fearmongering. Prasad’s commentary gives the impression of a powerful entity either implementing a hidden agenda designed to control our every move or bungling every decision. You know what I’m afraid of? Choking to death over days or weeks in the hospital without getting a chance to say goodbye to my family. Did that fear originate from the government or big Pharma? No, it came from working in a hospital and talking with physicians who take care of patients with COVID-19.”
Anti-Mask - On this same day, Prasad will also publish an article in Tablet, during the deadliest month for COVID ending the lives of American children, titled "The Cult of Masked Schoolchildren: History will not look kindly on our evidence-free decision to make kids suffer most." Now, let's be clear. Prasad has never treated a child hospitalized for COVID-19 and never will. He's far too busy ranting and raving online, and this is far more profitable for Vinay. This history, of Vinay's own words, does not look kindly on Prasad's profiteering whilst making a mockery of public health and shrugging off hundreds of needless, preventable child COVID-19 deaths.
01.19.2022 - Anti-Vax - Prasad also takes out an opinion editorial in Unherd, claiming “We need to talk about the vaccines: Public debate on side-effects is being censored”
01.23.2022 - Anti-Mask - "Wearing an n95 to avoid the virus after vaccination is futile. You will eventually stop wearing it. And then you will eventually get hit with a subsequent epidemic wave. Or catch the virus between waves." By now, Prasad is quite pissy that many people have upgraded their COVID-19 PPE to N95 respirators, a quality form of airborne protection.
Vinay hates that this engineering solution contradicts his narrative that SARS-CoV-2 is unavoidable and that we all must submit to the virus - spending a great deal of time over the next two years discrediting them, only to further destroy his own credibility as a scientific or medical expert. It's worth noting that Vinay Prasad will never actually speak to an engineer or expert on PPE engineering, going forward, to correct his many fictions.
01.26.2022 - “20 years post covid19…The thing we will be most ashamed of. The thing future generations will never forgive us for. Is how we treated children, long after we know the virus was not a serious threat to them.” Mountains of scientific research has shown that COVID-19 can cause a wide spectrum of serious harms in children. Prasad’s argument is that because children didn’t immediately drop dead, then COVID-19 must be just another mild flu.
01.30.2022 - "Everything done to keep kids 'safe' has been delusional, unproven, harmful mitigation that is not proportionate to the risks they face, harmful to their language and development, and has hurt a generation more than any other insult this century. The left failed kids. End of story." After over 1,000 pediatric COVID deaths were recorded last December, January 2022 would be the deadliest month on record for COVID-19 in children. Perhaps many of those children might still be alive if UCSF's Vinay Prasad hadn't spent the entirety of 2021 profiting from arguing against vaccinating them against COVID-19.
It’s worth nothing that Vinay Prasad has zero experience in pediatrics or responsibility when it comes to children’s health. His “solution” is to ignore the well-documented reality that COVID-19 can cause serious long-term health issues in children, including cognitive & neurological impairment.
02.01.2022 - Anti-Mask - "Maybe some people are unaware, but if everyone wore an n95 for 21 days...COVID would circulate among human beings forever and we will all be infected multiple times in our lives. Keep that in mind, when you feel the metal nose wire cut into your flesh outside at the park."
02.02.2022 - Prasad and fellow contrarian quack Alison Krug take out an article in right-wing pissrag Unherd titled: "Should we let children catch Omicron? Restrictions in school must never return" - now, the previous month had actually been one of the deadliest months when it comes to kids & COVID, but this fact did not change Prasad's perspective, that pretending everything was "normal" was more important than preventing needless disability and death. Prasad tweets out this article, claiming: "Our restrictions on children have prevented them from catching and overcoming a lot of common viruses over these last 2 years. That's not in their best interest. Safetyism can hurt."
This is repeating the same "immunity debt" myth that has been repeatedly debunked, pushed hardest by pediatric trainee Alasdair Munro, profiled here.
02.07.2022 - "If Sweden went on Joe Rogan, Spotify would delete the episode, and the White House would cheer. I think that's a problem." In reality, Sweden did terrible job when it came to their COVID-19 response, with one-third of Swedish adults suffering from cognitive impairment frequently labeled “brain fog.”
02.08.2022 - Anti-Vax - "Yes, COVID is on par with Flu in terms of risk to kids, but more to the point, the amount of restrictions we placed on children is in now way whatsoever commensurate with their risk of COVID. We restructured their entire lives, and deprived them of a year of education. Horrible." Any cursory look at pediatric deaths of flu and COVID between 2020 & 2022 would instantly prove that this obviously is not the case. Real-world child deaths don't matter to Vinay Prasad - the financial revenue from performing his fantasy is far more important.
06.12.2022 - "No asymptomatic child should ever be tested. Vaccines for young children are not necessary for them to return to school. As occurred in most of Europe, only America is victim to its own delusions." Of course, sending infectious children to school to get their teachers, fellow students, and their families infected to preserve the fantasy of "normalcy" certainly isn't "delusional," since your imagination stops functioning when you die of COVID-19. This is also the second year in a row that Vinay Prasad is publicly an anti-vax crank, a very lucrative grift that has yet to be condemned by the administration of UCSF.
06.26.2022 - Anti-Mask - On Substack, Prasad's latest anti-mask argument is thus: "Most of all if an attractive woman invited me over, I could imagine being dissuaded by sniffles," suggesting that Prasad's medical perspective is guided by the head between his legs instead of the one behind his ears. In reality, the vascular disease COVID-19 has been linked to penile tissue damage, erectile dysfunction, and infertility. Shredding your dick to get your dick wet - great thinking there, Vinay!
06.29.2022 - Anti-Test -"Break every home test. We should treat COVID-19 exactly like flu 2018. Test if you come to the hospital. Test if you feel really sick. If you feel good, go back to work. The testing profiteers are killing us." Not the deadly and disabling virus, of which Prasad denies its many harms. Testing and quarantining to prevent transmission to families, co-workers, teachers, patients, and everyone in our communities from infection with a deadly & disabling virus, is what's "killing us."
07.22.2022 - Anti-Vax -"Any strong advocate for Kids covid vaccination is off their rocker. It really doesn't matter. The risks are super low. Kids should return to normalcy." Even in complete ignorance of the many well-documented harms that COVID-19 can cause to children, including brain damage, what are children frequently surrounded with? Adults. Parents, grandparents, siblings, teachers, and many other adults - many of which could be at risk from serious COVID-19 harms if a child transmits the virus to them. Vaccination isn't perfect, but it helps, and quality PPE from respirators to CR boxes and HEPA filtration works even better. Even if you assume that children are not at risk for the many harms of COVID-19, sacrificing the health of the adults around them is unethical and damaging to children's emotional development & education, something that Vinay Prasad pretends to care about.
More importantly, calling child COVID-19 vaccine advocates "off their rocker" aka crazy is a highly unprofessional personal attack - demonizing, even - that has no place when talking about serious medical topics regarding children in the midst of a deadly & disabling pandemic that has already claimed too many.
08.05.2022 - Long COVID denial -"Latest CDC MMWR study on LongCovid in kids is trash" Prasad declares, because it means that everything Prasad has since for the past two years is completely wrong that kids aren't harmed by COVID-19. Thus, he attacks the research directly, and insists that Long COVID is imaginary and just a "narrative." Prasad will do this repeatedly now and in the following year, as he goes on to construct fictional evidence that supports his previous delusional conclusions - aka, the exact opposite of the scientific method.
08.25.2022 - Anti-Mask - "Why are people so mad at Leana Wen for not wanting to compel kids to mask after nearly all have had COVID already? That's like being mad at her for not wanting to mandate bike helmets after you finish your ride when you are sitting and eating at your dining table." Prasad's dishonest fallacy here is that after your initial SARS-CoV-2 infection, you are magically protected for life against any sort of bad outcomes thanks to the "natural immunity" myth, which is a cornerstone of Prasad's anti-vaccine advocacy.
Many American children are now on their third or fifth COVID-19 reinfection, developing serious long-term health complications including cognitive impairment and chronic fatigue that leaves them bedridden. Prasad refuses to acknowledge this reality, as it contradicts his fictional narrative, and he will frequently lash out against it going forward. On a side note, you should read our complete profile on fellow laptop class pandemic pundit Leana Wen and her many wrongdoings here.
08.27.2022 - Anti-Mask - Vinay Prasad, not a pediatrician, openly calls for the abolishment of the American Academy of Pediatrics, for pointing out that there is no serious evidence that supports the claim COVID-19 PPE harms child speech & language development. Prasad will go on to quote himself, claiming that "in medicine you have to prove that your intervention help." Understand that PPE is developed by engineers in a scientific field that is wholly separate from the field of medicine. Prasad will never talk to a serious PPE engineering expert to learn about how N95 respirators are evaluated in a scientific setting, continuing to spread disinformation about their effectiveness for his personal profit both financially and in social media clout.
08.31.2022 - "Every child on earth has had or will get Covid19. That's not news. Stop testing unless kids sick enough to seek medical care. Throw away the useless cloth masks. Panic will just add self-inflicted wounds like closing schools already did" - Prasad continues to campaign for a policy of total ignorance around the many harms of SARS-CoV-2, arguing that deaths and disability are not only irrelevant and inevitable, but later on, largely fictional.
Of course, the parent that is panicking because their child's developed cognitive and neurological impairment that has destroyed their academic and professional future? Prasad says you "have to accept it." This is not medical science - this is sadism coming from the academia of the University of California, San Francisco.
09.01.2022 - Long COVID denial - "When scientists keep repeating how many millions are out of the labor force due to long covid, does it matter if the number is actually true? Or is it okay to just repeat it if you heard it? May be good to repeat for a grant application?" Accusing the entire field of Long COVID research of being a bunch of dishonest frauds grifting for grant money, with zero evidence, is grossly unprofessional and a massive violation of any serious Code of Conduct. Prasad would double down on these baseless accusations in the following year.
09.04.2022 - Vinay Prasad makes a Substack post attacking any form of SARS-CoV-2 prevention, declaring "Legitimizing irrational anxiety is bad medicine. All those photos of CO2 monitors is the opposite of helpful; it is unhealthy. People can fall victim to excessive, irrational anxiety and doctors have to counsel them." Now, a CO2 monitor is an effective tool to track airflow and the potential for airborne SARS-CoV-2 transmission, a high reading can show how much rebreathed air a group of people in an indoor environment are sharing from one another's lungs.
Of course, Vinay Prasad's conclusion is that if you do not submit to endless COVID-19 infections and all the serious harms they can cause, you simply have "irrational anxiety." Vinay Prasad, who has zero qualifications in mental health, will frequently stigmatize those that do not share his view as "crazies" to be mocked, abused, and harassed into silence by his anti-vax, anti-mask social media following.
This is in direct contradiction to Vinay's statements in Spring 2020 in defense of John Ioannidis, is a pathetic ad hominem attack on his critics, and is utterly unprofessional. The mountain of ethics violations continues to grow.
09.06.2022 - "Even reading too many bad studies about COVID-19 can cause your brain to shrink," Prasad tweets in response to a NatGeo article about COVID-19 induced brain damage, because the mountains of scientific evidence contradicting his original belief that SARS-CoV-2 is just a mild flu virus are "bad" for questioning Prasad's ultimate authority as established by his Substack revenue.
09.13.2022 - Anti-Mask - Prasad becomes one of the earliest crusaders against PPE requirements in healthcare facilities, taking to Substack to write: "It's past time to throw away routine, forced masking in health care facilities: Wearing a mask from the door to the dentist chair is a waste of time, while N95s in COVID+ rooms are still reasonable." Of course, this only goes to show how little Prasad knows about airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and how aerosols travel through indoor settings. On top of this, an Australian setting linked nosocomial COVID-19 infections to literally hundreds of needless, preventable deaths in hospitals. Prasad simply refuses to accept the responsibility of being a medical professional - which is more than grounds for his termination and dismissal from UCSF.
09.18.2022 - Anti-Mask, Anti-Test - "Masking and testing won't be necessary. Accepting reality will be necessary. So much damage was caused by elevating laboratory scientific experts to health policy and evidence based medicine [aka Vinay Prasad] experts. It is not the same domain."
In medicine, you can "accept" an incredible number of preventable deaths as "reality," and even insist it is "necessary" if you are too scientifically illiterate to learn how to prevent those deaths. What Vinay Prasad of UCSF Medicine is doing here is abandoning his professional responsibilities to prevent needless death and disability and writing off these preventable casualties as "reality."
09.19.2022 - Vinay Prasad says that the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic should have been declared over and all pandemic protections removed after the vaccine was "widely available" to adults in Spring 2021 - but not children. Now, how much of a scientifically illiterate crank, with a mind so illogical, do you have to be to pretend that a vaccine vial sitting on a pharmacy shelf is the equivalent of a delivered vaccine to someone's arm? This is just misleading nonsense from a pestilence sycophant.
09.24.2022 - RCT Fetish - "Most people who think RCTs are unnecessary are ignorant. They have not read enough medical history and frankly don't understand the limits of observational studies. We need many more RCTs."
This directly contradicts one medical history book titled Ending Medical Reversal: Improving Outcomes, Saving Lives published in... 2015... by, lo and behold, Vinay Prasad, who as a matter of fact, writes in great detail about the ethical limitations of Randomized Control Trials. Prasad has never designed, performed, or participated in a Randomized Control Trial. He merely demands everyone else perform endless, un-ethical RCTs for him to quickly disparage if they don’t confirm his personal beliefs.
09.30.2022 - "We forget the possibility that it might not be good to avoid common infections," Prasad declares, pushing the "immunity debt" fiction that was coined in 2021 and championed by cranks like pediatric trainee Alasdair Munro, previously profiled here.
10.01.2022 - Prasad starts spooky season with a Substack post titled "I am going to mask because I want to get fewer colds & other flawed ideas: A new form of arrogance." Did you know that not wanting to get sick all the time makes you "arrogant" now? You think you're too "good" to get COVID? Shut up and know your place, serf! You will learn to love the virus!
10.10.2022 - "Yup #CovidisOver" chasing a trending hashtag and engagement bait. Over a year later, Vinay Prasad is still tweeting, podcasting, filming, and writing about COVID-19 incessantly. It seems he didn’t follow his own advice, yet again.
10.13.2022 - Prasad posts a collection of Corsi-Rosenthal boxes, effective engineering solutions to prevent airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and mocks them stating "If you are currently running one of these in your home, then I am 100% sure I disagree with you about COVID19 policy. I am also 100% sure you are out of touch with 96% of Americans who have returned to normal life. Strangely you still have 50% of Twitter. Go figure." Oddly enough, Prasad is continuing to rant and rave about COVID-19 to the end of 2023 - spreading dangerous misinformation and ridiculous slander about scientific experts and public health professionals. "Go figure," indeed.
"COVID19 is not going anywhere; we will all get it many times over our lives. This [Corsi-Rosenthal] box has 0 data showing a reduction in acquisition, but even if it worked, any effect will be washed out over a lifetime." Of course, this is again, a naked lie from a doctor wholly unqualified to comment on the engineering world of aerosol transmission. Would you rather get a deadly and disabling virus multiple times a year, or just a few times over a decade? Most "sensible" adults would prefer the latter, but Vinay Prasad of "Sensible Medicine" says you are mentally ill for fighting to prevent infections from an airborne virus.
10.14.2022 - "You would get more accurate peer review for a long COVID article if you walk into any bar in America and tell the folks sitting their your methods and findings than if you submit to a peer review journal," Prasad tweets. First of all, the people disabled by an airborne virus are likely not "living their best lives" at a shady neon-lit dive bar. Second of all, disparaging peer reviewed scientific papers for contradicting your personal opinions is incredibly convenient, if you decided you'd spend the next year self-publishing a bunch of garbage "Open Access" Opinion Editorials masquerading as self-published "scientific" publications.
RCT Fetish - "[Corsi-Rosenthal Boxes] -home made box fans w filters- have zero credible data they slow COVID-19: 0 RCTs. Moreover, slowing Covid-19 in 2022 is pointless. 93-97% will get it in short term. Most already have." Again, contradicting Vinay Prasad's own words in 2015 about the ethics of Randomized Control Trials, and insisting that SARS-CoV-2, an airborne socially transmitted virus, is a mythical force that cannot be opposed in any meaningful way. Perhaps if Vinay spent more time reading up on the science instead of posting garbage non-stop, he would manage to actually educate himself on topics that he knows little, but opines frequently about.
Anti-Mask - "Mask up? To what end? Covid19 will infect people for the next 10,000 years. Over the next 45, we will all get it many times. Even if community mask advice works (that's not clear) what is the goal? After you get COVID or vax or both, get back to life pronto. That's sensible."
It becomes very clear at this point, what this far-right libertarian is declaring: "get COVID, get back to work pronto." Your long-term health complications developed post-infection are obviously fictional, you lyin’ faker. In many parts of the world where certain diseases are "endemic," it's sensible to prevent infections thanks to the many serious harms these diseases can cause. "Sensible Medicine's" Vinay Prasad is treating a new infectious disease, that has already killed and crippled so many, in an incredibly nonsensible manner.
Vinay Prasad retweets British pestilence sycophant Michael Absoud, who refuses to acknowledge COVID-19 is a vascular disease, claiming "Schools are safe. They always were." when it comes to SARS-CoV-2 transmission. This absurd claim has been frequently debunked, from its initial inception. The argument here that Vinay Prasad is endorsing, is that in Spring 2020, we should have mass infected American children with Alpha variant SARS-CoV-2 - and even if you assumed kids were immune - these COVID positive kids would have infected their teachers, parents, and countless other adults. You don't want to actually know what that this bloodbath would have looked like, which is why Vinay Prasad endorses the "Great Barrington Declaration" and lies that it would have gone peachy. We'll model this scenario in a future article - be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss it.
10.15.2022 - RCT Fetish - "As of 2022, Zero cluster RCTs of masking in high income nations, pre and post vax. Zero RCTs of masking kids. Zero + RCT of paxlovid in vax'd. Zero RCTs of CR boxes. Zero RCTs of HEPA filters in schools. Zero RCTs of ba4/5 bi-valent booster. 'Evidence based Fiasco' was right." Of course, this directly contradicts Prasad's own writing in 2015: "But the truth is, a randomized [control] trial can only be done, ethically, if there is real uncertainty as to which is better, the treatment or the placebo."
More importantly, masks, HEPA filters, and CR boxes are all engineering solutions to fight airborne transmission. Prasad is now openly crossing over from the medical field, and declaring himself an expert on the field of engineering whilst applying the standards of medical science to a world he’s made it clear he knows very little about.
10.16.2022 - Vinay Prasad reveals that he refuses to accept that COVID-19 is more than a simple flu, tweeting, "Was reading a 2006 book. Beauvoir has the flu; his friend Gamache puts him in bed to rest. No saran wrapping the room shut; No CR box; No hepa filter; No mask; No quarantine; How life was pre-COVID & how life will be again; COVID19 will infect 93-97%, & then many times over." Of course, this rosy fictional account is all UCSF Medicine Professor Vinay Prasad needs to absolve himself as a medical professional from taking responsibility from preventing any sort of bad outcomes, all of those death & disabilities were simply realities to “accept.”
10.22.2022 - Anti-Vax, Anti-Mask - "93-97% of people will get COVID. Then we will all get it over and over again. Boosting 12 year olds won't protect 50 year olds. Masking doesn't work, but even if it did, it's pointless, because covid will find you when you lower it." The scientific illiteracy here is just incredible, a fountain of outrageous statements advocating for a surrender to pestilence.
Prasad crusaded for the policy choices to mass infect the population with COVID. Prasad then insisted that we must all submit to endless reinfections, regardless of the countless well-documented harms SARS-CoV-2 is now causing.
10.24.2022 - Anti-Vax - Vinay Prasad doubles down on Substack, declaring "Covid Vaccines Shouldn't Be Routine for Kids - The CDC's latest guidelines could wind up lowering vaccination rates for truly dangerous diseases, like polio and measles." This would become a self-fulfilling prophecy of which Prasad accepts zero responsibility for, blaming others for the problem he personally profited from causing.
10.26.2022 - Anti-Mask - "The best policy is: don't come if you don't feel good, come if you feel good. No need for testing, masking, or any other foolishness." Preventative medicine and PPE is now “foolishness,” apparently. How the hell does this viral crank still have a job, again?
10.31.2022 - A few days before the launch of the Pandemic Accountability Index, Vinay Prasad makes another Substack rant, declaring "We need pandemic accoundability - not amnesty - we have to make sure we never make the same errors again." Thankfully, no serious adult reads "his plan," and we have an extensive record of Vinay Prasad's refusal to accept the tangible reality of SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19, and the many harms this awful virus can cause.
11.04.2022 - Anti-Vax - "Dems have become the corporatist party. Pfizer basically writes EUA orders based on [rat emoji] data. At the worst moment of the pandemic Dems abandoned kids, esp poor minority kids to side with teachers unions. Instead of hearing criticism, they preferred to censor Twitter & Youtube." Yet again, Prasad dips his toes into anti-vax conspiracy theories, chasing engagement to build his following from the most reprehensible drecks of social media trolls.
11.10.2022 - Vinay Prasad endorses Alasdair Munro again, claiming: "Self-proclaimed misinformation experts have said immune debt is made up. [A term that did not exist until 2021] What's made up is their skill at separating fact from fiction. Policing science should not be done by people good at science, but it cannot be done by people not good. Internet full of amateur debunkers." Long before COVID-19, Vinay Prasad has never written a word about "immunity debt." However, thanks to this pediatric trainee, "immunity debt" was a convenient excuse to defend Prasad's mass-infection platform, so Vinay obviously latched onto it.
It's worth noting that Prasad himself has become a self-proclaimed expert on a number of topics vastly outside his fields of study, to further his goals of becoming a medical celebrity. He would block any qualified expert that dares to debunk his outlandish claims, as they are simply “haters” to be “dealt with.”
11.18.2022 - "People claiming that they're at high risk of bad COVID outcomes and people actually at risk of bad covid outcomes are not the same set. The former is vast. The latter is narrow. Many commenters have not familiarized theirselves with risk factors and odd ratio." Now Prasad has declared himself an expert on literally everyone's health, insisting that he knows their bodies when the man spends far more time posting online across Twitter, Youtube, and Substack than actually seeing and treating patients. This comment also ignores that countless "low-risk" people in public health have wound up disabled and even bed-ridden by Long COVID, including numerous top athletes.
11.25.2022 - Prasad declares that the entire field of Long COVID research is bunk, something he will hit upon frequently, claiming "There is not even credible data that COVID has complications beyond getting equally ill from any other respiratory virus." In fact, dozens and dozens of studies published over the past year disproved this claim. Prasad insists they're simply not "credible," claiming "bad studies dominate." It's clear now that the only "good" studies that Prasad will ever endorse are those that confirm his personal belief that SARS-CoV-2 is just another flu virus, that he formed in Spring 2020 and refuses to re-evaluate in light of the facts.
11.30.2022 - RCT Fetish - "We need RCTs for impella, masking toddlers, ivermectin, and more. Measuring real outcomes." Equating ivermectin, a long debunked anti-parasitical drug that has zero effectiveness treating COVID-19, to PPE, and demanding highly unethical randomized control trials for both, directly contradicts Vinay Prasad's own writings from 2015. What actually changed since then, to abandon one's understanding of medical ethics?
12.02.2022 - Vinay Prasad takes to Youtube to post a video with "Long COVID DEBUNKED" in the thumbnail. Ah yes, the mountains of research and patient testimonies and boundless news coverage since 2020 detailing the symptoms and disabilities experienced post COVID-19 infection...was all a charade that needed to be "debunked." Prasad's sadistic ignorance is on full display, yet again.
12.30.2022 - After countless Americans have been killed or disabled after being infected by SARS-CoV-2 transmitted to them by a fellow infectious American, Prasad ends the year accusing COVID test manufacturers of dishonest profiteering: "Crazy. No one needs to test. If you feel sick, relax. If you feel fine, go to work. You never needed anything more. Testing companies should prove their test improves outcomes over a simple heuristic, but they have never done so. Pandemic profiteering."
Of course, Vinay Prasad, with his contrarian quackery across Twitter Blue, Youtube ad revenue, and Substack subscriptions as an anti-vax grifter - this was not at all pandemic profiteering, no sir! Every accusation is an admission when it comes to Vinay Prasad - who now does little more than demonize scientists that oppose him.
2023
This is the year of Vinay Prasad's very many terrible, terrible attempts at scientific publications to lend legitimacy to his extensive fictional delusions. These papers, often little more than opinion editorials, are frequently self-published in "open-access" journals and not subject to any serious peer review. Unfortunately, they are pushed disproportionately over legitimate scientific research. The numerous ethics violations and outright dishonesty are incredibly disgraceful and worthy of professional shame. After having blocked the majority of his medical colleagues on social media, Prasad has fermented an echo chamber totally divorced from reality - more a cult than a dedicated following of a wannabe-celebrity scientific "expert."
01.07.2023 - "Many scientists said early on that schools should always stay open. Shame we did not listen." With all of the chaos that happened in New York City in the spring of 2020, the idea that Prasad (and cranks like him) are arguing, that by drowning the American population in the original strain of SARS-CoV-2, long before a vaccine was available, and repeatedly infecting unvaccinated children across America whilst hospitals here in NYC were at their breaking point, with some doctors and nurses even committing suicide in despair - is tantamount to societal suicide. Vinay Prasad has made it clear that he will never retire from being an anti-vaccine crank, and thus is unfit to serve in any medical or academic setting. Ranting elaborate fictions online is where his current priorities lie.
01.13.2023 - Anti-Vax - "They chose to push the narrative that COVID vax is as important for a 6 month old as MMR vax. Obviously, that is false. MMR is actually important. But naturally, some rejected both, rather than embraced both. Predictable." Correct Vinay, this was a predictable outcome - because Vinay Prasad and others lined their pockets by ranting and raving against the COVID-19 vaccine for the past two years. Vinay Prasad of UCSF is now blaming others for the anti-vax sentiment that he cultivated and personally profited from - disgusting, unprofessional, and frankly, grounds to strip Vinay of his medical license in the state of California.
01.18.2023 - Vinay Prasad retweets a sob story from previous PAI subject Anthony LaMesa, another laptop class pro-viral crank, about a homeless family freezing to death. Prasad tweets: "A profound indictment of the huge societal failures in America that no one wants to address. So many idiots on Twitter trying to slow spread of Covid in kids, which has already reached 96% and will reach 100% no matter what, forget the real lives that can be saved."
Unsurprisingly, nearly a year later, Vinay Prasad has still done nothing to fight homelessness in America. He only uses the homeless as a bludgeon to attack the characters of those fighting to prevent needless death & disability in children as the result of a COVID-19 infection. The moral depravity is truly indefensible, and the silence of UCSF's administration to condemn this sort of manipulative slander, can be seen as little more than an endorsement of such crass, unscientific talk.
01.28.2023 - Brandon Rose, MD & MPH replies to Vinay Prasad, stating:
"What a weird way to use all of your degrees and training. Blogging against vaccines and asking people to join you?"
01.29.2023 - "The pandemic is only over for people with sense. Infection is inevitable. Make peace with it and move on." An incredibly damning statement from a supposed medical professional - death is inevitable for all people, yet we generally do our best to prevent it for as long as possible. Public health's goal is to prolong lives as far as possible. Prasad is admitting, as an oncologist of UCSF, that nothing should be done to prevent the many harms from SARS-CoV-2, including death and crippling disability. You need to simply "make peace" with a massive uptick in preventable & needless disease, disability, and death - so Prasad’s going to retire from medicine, right? Or at the very least, stop talking about COVID-19? Ah, nope.
In reality, Prasad as a medical professional is abandoning his responsibility to society - the calling card of every libertarian crank too immature to accept the responsibilities of an adult in a civilized society.
01.30.2023 - "For kids 0-19, Death from Suicide is 3.4x times MORE common than Death from COVID. Death from suicide also more reliable statistic. Kids lives should NEVER be disrupted for COVID-19. We should be 3.4x worried about their mental health." Years later, Vinay Prasad regurgitates the same basic logical fallacy, whilst also insisting that pediatric COVID deaths are inflated and imaginary. Prasad has never talked about improving children's mental health, and solely focused on browbeating everyone into accepting the deaths, disabilities, and losses of primary caregivers of children to COVID-19 - he talks about this 100x more than he does improving children's mental health. Every accusation is an admission when it comes to dedicated contrarians such as UCSF's Vinay Prasad.
01.30.2023 - Anti-Vax - "No one has ever proven in a reliable study that vax post recovery from COVID19 lowers risk of future severe illness or death at any age, let alone kids." Prasad makes it clear at this point his entire perspective: That we should have mass infected unvaccinated children in Spring 2020, because fewer kids would have died than the very many 65+ year olds who will die. Also Long COVID is fake and a mental illness so we don't have to worry about that either. Following this, these kids would have been magically protected for life from new variants that emerge as a result of mass, repeated infection, from the "natural immunity" of the initial Spring 2020 infection. None of the "reliable" science (according to serious adults with real-world responsibility, and not social media contrarians like Prasad) supports this elaborate fiction, devoid of ethics or decency. Vinay doesn’t care.
01.31.2023 - Anti-Vax - Prasad has decided to double down on anti-vax nonsense, and beings rallying like any good cult leader: "You too can pledge: No more COVID19 shots until RCTs show a reduction in severe disease for someone of YOUR AGE and YOUR PRIOR COVID19 status." Because of course, public health and vaccine science is a popularity contest. Even worse, seeing an oncologist giving medical advice to strangers over the internet, for personal profit - is certainly an ethics violation, isn't it?
02.02.2023 - Vinay Prasad decides to go after MSNBC's Medhi Hasan and the American pediatric death count for COVID, which is over 2,000 dead kids at this time: "Not only is he factually wrong the number of dead kids. Typical of his journalism. The point he cannot grasp is closing schools, cloth masking toddlers did not lower this number. It just punished hundreds of millions globally. The net effect is massive loss of life years." Prasad, yet again, provides no evidence for this claim.
More importantly, we can see in 2021 from August, when the child COVID death count was 500+, and before Christmas 2021, this number jumped to over 1000+ in the Biden Administration's deathmarch towards "normalcy." So, in fact, remote schooling did prevent plenty of needless deaths, and the Biden administration got hundreds of children killed before vaccinating them against SARS-CoV-2. Unsurprisingly, Prasad also considers himself an expert on pediatrics as well as many other scientific fields, even outside medicine. Actual experts in this field who dare to correct him quickly find themselves blocked - demonized as “haters.”
02.04.2023 - Anti-Mask - Unsatisfied with the results of his previous pledge drive against vaccine boosters, Prasad starts a new grassroots effort just days later: "Once and for all, time to end universal hospital masking which has no randomized data to support it, and is dehumanizing. Read my new essay on [Sensible Medicine] and sign the petition."
You know what's dehumanizing? Dying of COVID-19 after being infected in the hospital. You literally cease being a human being - and this has already killed countless patients. People don't go to hospitals to be social or laugh with the witty comedians in medical scrubs - they're sick, and it's your job as a doctor or nurse to treat their ailments. If they get sicker or even die, because you infected them with COVID-19, then you have failed in your duties. Vinay Prasad is simply too immature and irresponsible to work in a medical or scientific setting.
The Cochrane Debacle
02.07.2023 - Anti-Mask - Vinay Prasad's fellow colleagues at the Neo-Confederate Brownstone Institute, Tom Jefferson and Stephen Heneghan, publish a "gold-standard" Cochrane Review "meta-analysis" on masking RCTs. This embarrassing failure of a scientific paper, rife with dishonesty, has been fully debunked repeatedly. It's worth nothing that neither Jefferson or Heneghan admit the scientific reality that SARS-CoV-2 is an airborne virus, insisting on the long-debunked droplet dogma.
Vinay Prasad will spend the following months going to the mat in support of this junk paper, refusing to acknowledge conflicts of interest, and lashing out at his critics, including the Editor-in-Chief of Cochrane, another woman that Prasad says need to "STFU" and should be fired for contradicting Jefferson & Heneghan's immaculate wisdom. Prasad really can’t handle any woman contradicting his fictions.
02.12.2023 - Prasad shrugs off the harm of COVID-19 reinfections, by claiming: "Are you out of your goddamn mind? It is less severe each subsequent time you get it. And your booster have never proven reduction in complications in RCT among people who got COVID prior."
The fictionalism on display here is astounding, the central delusion of the GBD: that mass infecting an unvaccinated everyone with COVID-19 in Spring 2020 would have gone fantastic, and all of the reinfections as a result of "natural immunity" would have simply been no big deal. A cursory look at Nextstrain makes it clear that a 2020 infection or 2021 vaccine is not sufficient protection on its own for the viral soup we're facing in 2023.
02.15.2023 - Anti-Mask - Sharing a tweet from "Team Reality" pestilence sycophant Kristen Mag mocking those still wearing respirators to protect themselves from COVID-19, Vinay Prasad also gets in on the mockery, stating: "Ha. Absolutely no evidence to suggest getting COVID six times versus seven times in a lifetime will make any difference. And o.o% of people were doing this pre-pandemic. Just magical thinking on display." Ironically enough, it truly is "magical thinking" to think that endless repeated infections of a virus that has killed and disabled so many couldn't have cause serious long-term health complications. Prasad's delusions at this point are fully detached from reality, and the mountains of evidence that repeated COVID-19 infections can cause serious harms continue to grow.
02.16.2023 - Retweeting far-right conservative think-tank crank Phil Kerpen, Vinay Prasad says "This is 100% accurate," that: "Many COVID errors stemmed from public health's belief that their job is to promote favored policies and behaviors rather than to accurately convey information. Must be fixed." Kerpen has zero medical or scientific background, and Prasad reveals that he is completely illiterate about the fundamental concepts and responsibility of public health. Not surprising from someone who exclaimed in 2017 that "I couldn't stand the rote memorization of things that seemed so useless."
02.18.2023 - Anti-Vax - Vinay Prasad goes all in on anti-vax sentiment, claiming "Recent lancet paper showing prior infection as good as vaccination & all our mandates were unjust means Public health lied. Also this is a meta analysis so the lie has been known for some time. I explain:" linking to a Youtube video titled: "NEW Lancet Paper - Public Health Lied About Natural Immunity" - This is an anti-vaccine talking point that has been around for centuries, it was debunked then and is debunked now, but don't let that stop Vinay Prasad from playing the hits!
02.19.2023: - RCT Fetish, Anti-Mask - "For those of us hoping to be on this planet for the next 30 to 50 years, we will all get Covid many more times. Boosting without RCT data and masking in public is totally irrational. Cannot be sustained even if it did work, which it doesn't. Most Americans already reject both" - Prasad will keep repeating this sentiment over, and over, and over, no matter how much the facts change that repeated COVID infections can have devastating effects on one's health.
02.21.2023 - Anti-Mask - Vinay Prasad endorses another worthless laptop class Opinion Editorial, this time from Bret Stephens titled "The Mask Mandates Did Nothing. Will Any Lessons Be Learned?" a far-right crank who believes climate change is fake among multiple other unserious beliefs. This "Sanders fan" "progressive" can't seem to find a single left-wing thinker he actually likes.
03.03.2023 - Vinay Prasad appears on right-wing libertarian rag "Reason," with the headline "Stop Trusting Public Health," claiming: "Public health officials should lose your trust because of their poor performance." Left unsaid is the obvious: the "public health" guidance that Vinay Prasad would have given in 2020 would have exponentially grown the bodycount and caused endless collateral damage as a result of Prasad's incompetence. When you see human lives as little more than numbers on a spreadsheet, you lack the empathy required of an adult with real-world responsibility. Hence why Prasad settles for endless, nonsensical ranting for social media revenue.
03.13.2023 - Anti-Mask - Vinay drops another lengthy Substack rant, titled "You should mask in 2023 exactly as often as you masked in 2017," with the quote: "Instead of spending money on paid sick leave, and universal health care, liberals have squandered their social capital on masking advice, which is nonsensical and unproven. They are no better than the misinformed people they mock. It is just different misinformation."
Ironically enough, Prasad has grown a sizeable audience of "misinformed people," encouraging them to not get vaccinated or protect themselves from COVID-19. Secondly, the number of "liberals" still masking in 2023 is few and far between. At this point, Prasad has truly lost the plot, and can do little more than perform cheap carnival tricks for his captive audience.
03.14.2023 - RCT Fetish - Tracy Beth Hoeg, an anti-vax quack sports physician that works under Vinay Prasad, publishes alongside Vinay a paper titled "An evidence double standard for pharmacological versus non-pharmacological interventions: Lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic" - tweeted out by Tracy with the comment: "Why is evidence of efficacy from RCTs expected before we recommend medications but school/business closures, masks & other NPIs were not only recommended but mandated w/o such evidence? @VPrasadMDMPH & I argue this is a dangerous irrational double standard."
This is an incredibly easy and simple question to answer: The field of medicine (vaccines, pills, etc.) is separate from the scientific field of engineering (respirators, air filters, etc.) and thus, the effectiveness of tools is evaluated via separated methods. Any PPE engineer at 3M could quickly explain this. What Vinay Prasad and Tracy Beth Hoeg are doing is pretending to be stupid for the sake of being anti-vax social media charlatans.
To quote University of Colorado Professor Jose-Luis Jimenez:
"There is no double standard. There are better ways to get evidence for NPIs (e.g. masks), and we use those ways. For medications we are stuck with RCTs, a poor and cumbersome system to get evidence, prone to confounders, but the only one available in that case."
Ah, whoops. Prasad and Tracy would not retract their paper for this basic flaw.
03.16.2023 - Anti-Mask - Vinay Prasad tweets another Substack rant of his, saying: "You will love this: I go through the whole Cochrane mask fiasco so you don't have it! NYTimes, Cochrane corrections, Tom Jefferson, Tufecki, it is all in here. This is the latest fiasco in [Evidence Based Medicine]." First off, PPE engineering is not medicine. It's engineering. Engineers generally do not employ RCTs to evaluate the effectiveness of their work, and for many good reasons.
Second of all, Prasad writes: "Yes, we should have done more RCTs of masking during the pandemic. Lord knows, I shouted every chance I got." Yes, this is precisely what Prasad's claim to fame during the COVID-19 pandemic is: shouting about masks. Instead of saving lives, Prasad ranted from behind a screen, and we're supposed to find him more trustworthy than frontline doctors, or PPE engineers, or any serious adult with real-world responsibilities. Yeah, no.
03.23.2023 - Vinay Prasad would go on to enlist Kelley (@KelleyKga) Krohnert, a failed web designer from Georgia, whose incompetence in web & graphic design combined with zero scientific or medical qualifications, combined with a Substack account would make her a notorious anti-public health celebrity. Krohnert would be a notoriously incorrect co-author on many of Prasad's "scientific" publications. She tweets: "Three years ago when I started tracking Covid data in Georgia, I never imagined I'd end up co-authoring a paper on basic mathematical errors the CDC made during the pandemic. Most of the errors exaggerate the risk to children."
Now, we've reviewed this paper, "Statistical and Numerical Errors Made by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention During the COVID-19 Pandemic" previously. It's dogshit. It uses alleged typos to accuse the CDC, which outputs data on a 24/7 basis, of producing fraudulent pediatric COVID death statistics. Posted to an "open-access" platform, it was subject to no peer-reviewed. Our review of it's many childish flaws can be found here:
UCSF failed to condemn Prasad, Tracy, and Kelley for their grave incompetence. To quote Greg Travis (@greg_travis via Twitter): "Prasad is accusing every state health department, every hospital, every county coroner of CONSISTENTLY inflating deaths among children, not the CDC. The CDC is just disseminating information that comes from the states themselves. Now I don't know about you but I have a hard time taking a paper seriously when its underlying premise (that the CDC is getting the numbers wrong, in one direction only) is built on a foundation of not even knowing where the numbers come from in the first place. For example, Forida has reported 122 deaths from COVID in the 0-19yo age range to the CDC via COVID case reports. Florida also shows 102 deaths from COVID in 0-19yos on death certifications that it reports to the CDC. So which is it? 122? 102? Neither one?"
Unsurprisingly, Vinay Prasad loves to accuse everyone except himself of "unacceptable incompetence." The number of organizations he has lashed out at, called incompetent, or demanded their abolishment… is staggering.
03.25.2023 - Prasad would double-down on this sentiment, tweeting: "Half a million people and counting are aware of CDCs errors. I encourage everyone to download a copy and read the table. This is damning stuff. CDC should be dismantled if it cannot accurately report the number of kids dead from covid. This is a basic competency and CDC failed."
This self-published paper that was never peer-reviewed was retweeted by far-right cranks like Tom Elliot of the RNC, Michael P Senger, Jay Bhattacharaya's favorite fanboy Rav Arora, "Team Reality's" Kristen Mag, and Philip Holloway.
03.26.2023 - Prasad makes another Substack post, titled: "Denmark: Where Everyone Agrees with me about Covid-19 and Oncology," as if medical science is somehow a popularity contest. Childish argument from a childish person.
03.31.2023 - Another dogshit paper the PAI has previously debunked would be shared by Vinay Prasad, who posts on Substack "Bombshell: New Study on Long COVID in kids and young adults FAILS to link COVID to Long COVID." Prasad will never accept the reality of Long COVID, especially pediatric Long COVID disability, because it means that the ideological premise he adopted in Spring 2020 and has doubled down on since, that COVID-19 is just the flu, was entirely wrong. The guilt and shame that he's been an absolute twat for years now is too much for him to bear. Thus, all Prasad can do is double down with rants and raves that grow more and more non-sensical in the face of mountains of evidence. Explained here:
Republican Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy would retweet this, claiming "Turns out that so-called long Covid has absolutely nothing to do with whether you had Covid, at least among young people. Just follow the science. The fact that people ever used the term long Covid at all is a farce. Pretty incredible actually." Prasad would not rebuke Vivek - sadistic cranks such as this are Vinay's crowd now. Anything in the pursuit of clout.
04.04.2023 - Anti-Vax - Florida Surgeon General Joeseph Ladapo, a delusional far-right crank employed by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, would find a stalwart defender in UCSF's Vinay Prasad, who tweets an endorsement of Ladapo's anti-vax position: "It's not COVID vs. vaccine bc post vax, all people get COVID eventually. It also matters what the age, sex and prior covid status is. It matters what dose we are talking about and Moderna or Pfizer. Ladapo is closer to correct than his critics." In reality, what Joseph Ladapo did was intentionally alter the results of a study to justify his prior anti-vax conclusion. University of California San Francisco Professor Vinay Prasad is defending the modern equivalent of Andrew Wakefield. Odd look.
04.20.2023 - RCT Fetish - Prasad will double down as a "debunker" of Long COVID disability by tweeting out something absolutely inane: "I love how people are surprised they have run zero RCTs for long Covid. NIH trials of NPIs - 0. NIH trials of alternative vax dosing/schedule - 0. NIH booster trials - 0. Useless observational studies are in vogue!" Eight years after writing about the limitations of randomized control trials, Vinay Prasad will spend 2023 spamming the term "RCT" over, and over, and over again. For little more than social media engagement. This is not science. This is performative crankery.
04.29.2023 - Anti-Mask - Vinay Prasad will become Reddit Famous thanks to an exchange between him and doctor Jeffrey Bien. Prasad tweets, in a mocking and condescending tone: "I am confused. If you already got COVID and already developed long covid then what does the mask do?" An incredibly revealing statement of complete ignorance.
Bien replies: "Be careful or you'll upset the super secret ultra-double-long-Covid community," to which Prasad replies "Haha double long covid. Just like double IPA!" This exchange would appear at the top of "Murdered By Words," with over 16,000+ upvotes, thanks to a rebuttal by Winston Blick: "So when you guys were aspiring MDs did you dream of someday using your authority to mock the chronically ill, or did your disdain for the sick just come organically alongside the clout chasing?"
05.05.2023 - RCT Fetish, Anti-Mask - "Another anti-science piece saying RCTs can't test masks. RCTs alone can test masks. RCT combines filtration w/ real world use & adherence. RCT tests the whole cake recipe, not just if the sugar is sweet. Mask zealots would rather kill science than run trials."
Engineers at PPE manufacturers around the globe have been developing masks for many decades long before Vinay Prasad ever learned how to piss up a well. Engineers do not use randomized control trials to test the effectiveness of PPE. Are we supposed to assume that a UCSF Oncologist knows more about PPE than the engineers who have been developing effective airborne respirators long before the COVID-19 pandemic?
The constant accusations that everyone in science except Vinay Prasad is an incompetent loon are highly unprofessional, a violation of UCSF's Code of Conduct, and highly unbecoming of the University of California San Francisco. Isn’t this the sort of “demonization” that Prasad was so worried about back in April 2020?
05.11.2023 - "Reopening schools in 2020 did not require HVACs nor testing nor 'high quality' kiddo's masks. It required absolutely nothing besides will. Ala Sweden. If anything, it just required no teachers union." You see, after COVID-19 quickly killed so many teachers, it was that nefarious teachers' union that convinced educators they shouldn't needlessly throw their lives away to protect the "normalcy" of kids' education. To re-visit Prasad's 2017 StatNews profile: "Prasad is putting too much weight on statistical tables, instead of listening to the real-world experience."
05.26.2023 - (In reply to GBD's Jay Bhattacharaya) "People just don't want to admit what's really bothering them. That Destanis Florida had the best COVID-19 policy in the United States. Balacing competing risks, and freedom. Banning useless masks in kids." Governor DeSantis is a far-right sadistic crank, and countless deaths occurred, even in children, after Bhattacharaya claimed Florida had “protected the vulnerable.”
06.06.2023 - Anti-Vax - After a year and a half crusading against the pediatric COVID vaccine, Vinay Prasad tweets "It must have been so frustrating to have this play out in a courtroom of idiots. No one wanted kids COVID vax anyway. American people smarter than experts." For two and a half years now, Prasad and his colleagues have crusaded against a pediatric COVID vaccine, and now he acts like he had zero influence on the rising anti-vaccine sentiment.
Fighting for Childhood Smoke Inhalation
06.08.2023 - Anti-Mask - A wave of toxic smoke from Canadian wildfires would soon envelop the Eastern seaboard of the United States. Vinay Prasad would go hard in the paint for insisting that making children inhale this smoke was not a big deal. Medical professionals encouraging smoke inhalation in children is grounds for termination in any serious professional setting. It seems University of California San Francisco has become a playpen for anti-vax, anti-public health cranks to line their own pockets.
Vinay Prasad tweets: "The health impact of outdoor exposure on way to school is <<<<< the health cost of closing school w it's many downstream effects. Public health is currently being run by a bunch of nitwits, incapable of thinking about shot and long term risk, human behavior, & cost." Prasad will provide no evidence for these claims.
Vinay Prasad reveals that he is little more than a libertarian with a privatization fetish and a hatred of organized labor, following up with: "I really hope that in return for your repeated failure to do what is right for children [infecting them with a deadly & disabling virus as well as toxic wildfire smoke] we move to a voucher system that crushes your failed district and destroys your union system that always places adult interests over children."
06.10.2023 - Anti-Mask - Vinay Prasad will double down on this pro-pediatric-smoke-inhalation sentiment in a Substack post titled "Forest fires and n95 masking: Masking without evidence is an untreated mental illness plaguing public health." Again, Prasad will never talk to a PPE engineer. UCSF will refuse to condemn this sadistic detachment from scientific reality.
To quote evolutionary biologist T. Ryan Gregory:
"I will never understand this RCT dogma. Do medical schools really teach that this is the only way to do science or engineering? I guarantee that these people benefit every day from safety measures that were not subject to an RCT because that's not how they are tested."
"If a doctor says you're mentally ill for not wanting to breathe in wildfire smoke, maybe his many, many similar takes on masks and the nature of evidence and mental health about the pandemic can be considered less than compelling."
06.17.2023 - One of Vinay Prasad's closest social media friends is far-right misogynistic abuser Eli Klein, who long before the pandemic, exploited and abused women as documented in the reality show "Gallery Girls." Eli tweets: "For three days in a row, someone stopped me on the street to thank me for my advocacy against Covid restrictions, especially my push towards open schools...I saw children being harmed unnecessarily and felt obligated to fight for them." Now, it's worth nothing that Eli Klein is an art gallery pervert with zero medical or scientific qualifications. He "fought" for kids by "fighting" to repeatedly infect them with a deadly and disabling virus from the safety of a screen.
Vinay Prasad, in a "shitthatdidnthappen.txt" moment, claims "For a while I was stopped daily for months with something like this. Just goes to show, as you well know, Twitter full of irrational, dangerous extremists while regular people get it. Case in point: Covid is over IRL." The desperate desire to be treated like a Hollywood movie star is an incredibly poisonous delusion, one that men with zero real-world responsibilities must indulge upon to retain their unearned overconfidence.
06.17.2023 - Vinay Prasad will go on to endorse anti-vax, anti-Semitic Presidential Candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
06.22.2023 - "I refuse to debate [Peter Hotez]. Real scientists can't legitimize ppl who supported masking indoors, lockdowns, prolonged school closure, and mandating a vaccine that did not have evidence it benefit 3rd parties. People might get the wrong idea that his COVID views were helpful." Ironically, whilst Peter Hotez was actually saving lives by developing a low-cost patent-free COVID vaccine, Vinay Prasad spent this entire time angrily ranting online in defense of a deadly & disabling virus that has already harmed and killed so many.
06.24.2023 - "Medhi Hasan is an idiot. Of course we have to learn to live with covid. Everyone is living with it. That is precisely what happened. No one gives a shit about COVID anymore & no one sane is taking any precautions. It even bores me & I know fully how wrong the establishment was." Of course, a growing body of research in viral persistence is showing that actually, SARS-CoV-2 is learning to live inside us, causing untold harm. Prasad would also not stop talking about COVID-19.
07.12.2023 - Anti-Mask, RCT Fetish- Vinay Prasad and his favorite quack sports physician Tracy Beth Hoeg will self-publish another paper not subject to peer review, titled: "Characteristics and quality of studies pertaining to masks published in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report." Tracy tweets: "Is CDCMMWR a reliable journal for informing health policy? In a new paper Alyson Haslam VPrasadMDMPH & I analyze 77 MMWR reports pertaining to masks. Our results were concerning. >75% concluded masks were effective w/only 30% testing masks. 0 were RCTs." Yet again, Vinay Prasad refuses to consult a single PPE engineer to correct his misconceptions about RCTs.
07.18.2023 - Anti-Mask - "I saw a 4 year old wearing this [pediatric KF94 mask] outside today. The makers of this should be prosecuted. There is no evidence it is certified to this standard in children of this age. The use of this in a child is disgusting. An adult mental illness that hurts kids. CDC and APP failed."
For thousands of American children, their parents would have probably preferred a child-sized KF94 over the child-sized coffin that COVID-19 put them in. No wonder Prasad has to argue that pediatric COVID deaths are imaginary, but also unpreventable.
07.19.2023 - Anti-Mask - In celebration of right-wing fast-food chain In-N-Out banning PPE for employees, Vinay Prasad posts to Substack claiming "In-N-Out Burger is more rational than US Hospitals: The chain bans masking out of preference, as a logical person would have done post-vaccination." Well, except for all the people who died or wound up disabled thanks to a breakthrough infection post-vaccination. They often wish they kept masking to prevent a COVID-19 infection.
07.25.2023 - Anti-Vax - Quote tweeting Twitter owner Elon Musk, Prasad tweets: "For a healthy young man, it's easy to show, and we have done so, [lie] that multiple doses of vaccine and then infection is worse than just infection. All roads lead to infection. The people trying to leave community notes have poor thinking skills." Again, everyone except Vinay Prasad is mentally deficient, and only libertarian cranks like Prasad are smart & sadistic enough to give medical advice to the entire world.
08.10.2023 - Vinay Prasad doubles down on his sadistic crusade to "debunk" Long COVID disability, tweeting out: "Long COVID research funding is a huge scam. The people taking this money have incentive to do poor quality work to exaggerate the problem. They inflated rates of long COVID repeatedly. Worse, they run zero RCTs. It's a total grift." Vinay Prasad has no evidence to support this claim, and yet again, every accusation is an admission from the Enron/Koch funded contrarian.
08.14.2023 - Prasad will go on to personally attack laboratories studying Long COVID, Putrino Lab specifically, stating: "Delusional fear from a laboratory studying covid. Huge part of the problem are scientists entirely ignorant to the set of risks human beings face. Comparing this thread to reality, where no one cares, is illustrative."
David Putrino responds: "When this guy calls you ignorant about your views on #LongCOVID and buttons it with no one cares, that's how you absolutely know you're on the right side of history. @UCSF - maybe give back that @NIH #RECOVER money? Vinay says no one cares."
Prasad doubles down: "No one is taking COVID precautions anymore. Wake up. Go outside. Your long COVID numbers are inflated. You should give back your grant money. I doubt anything will come from it." Prasad's tone is what you would expect from message board arguments about the Playstation 2 versus the Gamecube in 2003, not from a medical professional when dealing with a newfound crippling disability.
08.19.2023 - For the dedicated anti-vaccine website owned by anti-Semite RFK, Jr., "Children's Health Defense," a quote by Vinay Prasad appears: "Ultimately, misinformation is just a weaponized term meaning nothing. People who use it are often ignorant of science and truth." Prasad refuses to rebuke CHD and RFK Jr, whose anti-vax crusade has already gotten dozens of children killed. In truth, misinformation is Prasad’s primary source of income.
08.26.2023 - Replying to Medhi Hasan, Vinay Prasad tweets: "School closure did not save the lives of parents, and reopening did not kill parents." This is a naked lie. Hundreds of thousands of American children lost a primary caregiver to COVID-19, many because the child was infected at school, and brought the virus home to infect and kill a primary caregiver. This has been well-documented fact for over two years now. University of California San Francisco Professor Vinay Prasad has completely detached himself from reality to chase after social media clout, abandoning any sort of serious obligation to scientific tenets.
08.27.2023 - Echoing his own previous sentiments, Vinay Prasad tweets: "The only thing we need to do about covid-19 is unfollow anyone who's still worried about it. Going to circulate for as long as human beings exist, best to not even test for it." Ignorance as public health doctrine does little more than degrade everyone’s health, an experiment that America is presently experiencing in real-time.
09.02.2023 - "Covid is over, go have fun"
09.09.2023 - After Vinay's previous failed attempts at being a cult leader, Prasad decides to raise the flag yet again, reviving an anti-public health catchphrase from 2020: "DO NOT COMPLY." Prasad tweets: "If a healthy kid is sick with the sniffles & you test them for COVID19, you are actually HARMING that child. B/c you will deprive them of education & no one has ever shown any benefit to them or others. Never test kids; send them 2 school when better." Vinay Prasad is now openly advocating to send children sick with COVID-19 to school, in order to infect fellow students, their teacher(s), and families - which has already killed over a million Americans and disabled many more. It's clear at this point that Vinay Prasad has no place in any medical or scientific setting.
Prasad writes: "If you child is sick, you should not test them, and you should send them to school if they are mildly ill [and contagious]." Ignoring the research that links COVID-19, a vascular disease which crosses the blood-brain barrier... to cognitive and neurological impairment. All you are doing is increasing your child's risk for developing Long COVID disability, and getting everyone else around them sick. There is no bottom when it comes to Vinay Prasad's sadistic depravity.
“Only non-violent resistance can halt irrational public health actors.” Ah, yes. Sending your sick child to school to infect their teachers, fellow students, and respective families, potentially killing someone, is now “non-violent resistance.”
09.10.2023: Vinay Prasad will double down on sending children infectious with COVID-19 to school, tweeting: "If a kid is just a little sick, you should send them to school and if very sick, keep at home. Testing for Covid is harmful in America bc it will lead to prolonged absence without evidence of benefit...This is obvious stuff tbh." Of course, the countless children who are now disabled by Long COVID are suffering from prolonged absences that could have been avoided if the adults protected them from infection with a deadly & disabling virus.
09.10.2023: Dr. David Gorski writes a fantastic article on UCSF's Vinay Prasad for Science Based Medicine, titled: "Dr. Vinay Prasad fully embraces the antivax message of 'Do Not Comply:' COVID-19 'contrarians' like Dr. Vinay Prasad have long complained about being labelled 'antivaccine,' which they view as unfair. Why, then, do they embrace antivax messages like 'do not comply,' even if they don't use the exact words?" Gorksi writes:
Again, remember that Dr. Prasad has an MPH. He has an advanced degree in public health! Yet, he’s telling his readers to stop complying with any request or mandate made by public health authorities, not only that, to go completely “dark” with respect to providing data to public health authorities that will help them deal with infectious diseases—or even track the prevalence of infectious diseases.
This is malpractice and must be condemned with extreme prejudice.
09.25.2023 - Frequent COVID minimizer and NYT contributor Benjamin Ryan tweets: "In a bold new paper, three academics criticize how #longCovid has been studied. They say they term itself is so ill defined it should be discarded and that the studies have often been riddled with bias." This Opinion Editorial, masquearading as a scientific publication, is written by Vinay Prasad, Tracy Beth Hoeg, and the UK's Shamez Ladhani for yet another "Open Access" journal not subject to peer review. Titled "How methodological pitfalls have created widespread misunderstanding about long COVID," the paper provides no serious evidence to justify their claims. Ben Ryan refuses to disclose that Prasad has years of statements disparaging Long COVID and has an obvious bias on the topic. For a New York Times contributor, this is not unexpected misconduct.
The Independent, Sky News, ITV, and NY Post would cite this "study," which lacks a "methods section." To quote Twitter user AbundantLandUse: "A meta needs a methodology section, or it's just an opinion piece." Prasad loves to dress up his opinions as legitimate scientific research, as if his feelings are just as good as hard scientific facts - better, even.
09.30.2023 - Vinay Prasad writes a full-blown endorsement of the nonsense of the AIER/Koch funded "Great Barrington Declaration," rambling on that: "The sensible strategy [in Spring 2020] would have been to protect elder and nursing home patients (with focused protection), have everyone else continue normal life, and vaccinate the elderly (voluntarily) and then call it day. Eventually, most academics will come to this conclusion, which is essentially the position of Sweden and other parts of Europe. The GBD authors were far more accurate than their critics. The Overton window is moving."
Notice the use of the term "academics," instead of the frontline medical doctors and nurses who actually have to treat patients. Vinay Prasad has always had the luxury of treating the SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 pandemic as an abstract exercise, and has zero respect for those with real-world responsibilities, gleefully ignorant of actual human suffering, not talking about PPE.
The ACCP Debacle
The American College of Clinical Pharmacy is a professional organization of pharmacists which recently organized a conference, inviting Vinay Prasad as a keynote speaker. The membership, of professional pharmacists with real-world responsibilities instead of endlessly ranting online, instantly took issue with this and gave a strongly worded backlash, with some canceling their memberships entirely. AACP management inevitably rescinded their invite to Prasad, which triggered incredible meltdowns from fellow cranks such as GBD's Jay Bhattacharya, who claimed Prasad is an "accomplished scientist," and threatened that ACCP would no longer be "taken seriously as a professional organization."
10.12.2023 - David Zweig, an original Great Barrington Declaration pestilence sycophant, publishes on Substack a rant titled "After Complaints, Pharmcy Conference Cancels Scheduled Keynote by Doctor. Accusations were made - many without evidence - against Dr. Vinay Prasad, as part of a campaign against him speaking at a conference. It took less than a day for his invitation to be rescinded." Zweig will admit that he talks to Prasad on a regular basis and fails to clarify this relationship, claiming Prasad "is far too prolific to cover everything he has said." Prolific in what, exactly? Testing the limits of how much can one truly love the sound of their own voice, slurping saliva in their fake podcast studio?
10.13.2023 - Anti-Mask, RCT Fetish - Prasad's self-titled "lab" publishes another embarrassing “review,” claiming: "ALL mask studies in CDCMWRR. Evidence is weak. 0% randomized control trials. 75% concluded "masks work." Despite only 15% being significant. CDC does not follow the science; they contribute to low quality science noise." Vinay Prasad has reduced RCTs to little more than a meme at this point, so it's not surprising that he keeps hammering the same tune - as this is propaganda, not science; Repeat the same lie enough times until people actually start to believe it.
10.17.2023 - Vinay posts a Youtube video titled "Prasad's Lecture is Cancelled from ACCP conference b/c online haters" - again, Vinay Prasad refuses to accept that the larger medical field has zero respect for Vinay as an anti-vax crusader against public health. Instead of accepting responsibility, Prasad whines about "online haters."
Vinay will also take to far-right culture warrior Bari Weiss' pissrag, "The Free Press," to whine "My job is to terrify cancer cells. But apparently it's not just malignant cells that get uneasy around me." Cells obviously are not cognizant, for starters. Secondly, Prasad has taken in recent months to crusade against routine cancer screenings. So obviously, Vinay is not in the business of "terrifying" cancer cells - he'd much rather help them succeed in causing needless, preventable deaths.
10.19.2023 - Anti-Mask - "Instead of randomized trials, which balance outcome distributions in the absence of Tx effects, the authors of this piece [in Scientific American critical of the Cochrane mask review] prefer comparisons of places that are fundamentally different beyond masking choices. It's sad that Scientific America has become so unscientific." Isn't it odd, how Vinay Prasad can't seem to stop attacking so many different institutions? Amazing what you're capable of when you don't have to actually treat patients and have zero real-world responsibilities beyond posting sadistic rants online.
10.29.2023 - In response to a 60 Minutes piece about COVID airborne transmission, Prasad responds: "Yes [COVID] is airborne. No community masking doesn't help, never did. No we should not install massive HEPA ventilators in all schools bc there are so many better things to do with the money. Crack the window." Prasad has made it clear by now that he thinks a "better thing to do with the money" is crush teachers' unions and destroy public education on behalf of his billionaire masters.
10.30.2023 - Vinay Prasad goes full culture warrior, in a Youtube video titled: "COVID Forgiveness," mirroring Koch-funded economist Emily Oster's call in The Atlantic for "pandemic amnesty." This is obvious red meat to get the anti-mask, anti-vax, anti-public health fanbase fired up and screaming at those with real-world responsibility in medicine, of course. "The experts on the wrong side of school closure want forgiveness; do they deserve it?" in which Prasad claims "experts simply want to be bigger virtue signalers," a common right-wing catchphrase that has been rather embarrassing for any serious medical professional to use for quite some time.
Of course, had Prasad and his pestilence sycophant ilk got what they wanted in Spring 2020, the sheer number of deaths and needless agony would have completely shattered civil society. Collapsed hospitals, mass graves, vastly higher casualty numbers - especially in children and teachers. Prasad has no evidence that a mass-infection strategy in Spring 2020 would have saved lives and refuses to accept all of the evidence since then that proves he's full of it. Irresponsible talk from a crank that has abandoned his real-world responsibilities to rant online in the abstract.
11.08.2023 - Anti-Vax - In response to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau getting the latest COVID-19 booster, Prasad tweets: "A healthy 51 year old who had covid already. It's not clear he should get the shot. If he wanted to push for progressive values, Health Canada would ask Pfizer for a randomized study to prove these claims."
11.10.2023 - Anti-Vax - "Just out on [Sensible Medicine.] I explain why it is entirely predictable that parents increasingly distrust the CDC's vaccine guidance. The CDC equated necessary MMR vaccines with unproven covid-19 shots to all children in 2023 and beyond. Parents reject all." After years of cultivating anti-vax sentiment, Vinay Prasad now blames the CDC and public health advocates for the rise of anti-vax parents refusing to protect their children with safe & effective vaccines.
More importantly, Prasad is repeating the common anti-vax meme that SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are "experimental" or "unproven." This is dangerous, irresponsible rhetoric, and to profit from catering the growing anti-vax movement is disgusting and disqualifying misconduct that should be condemned by the administration of University of California, San Francisco.
Conclusion
It's astounding just how alone Prasad finds himself at this point in the winter of 2023, having blocked the vast majority of his professional colleagues on social media for calling out his basic epidemiological flaws, left to perform for his rabid anti-vax audience and fellow pestilence sycophant influencers. University of California San Francisco's reputation, thanks to the cowardice of Dean Talmadge King, is now largely in the mud thanks to be a hotbed for anti-public health contrarians like Prasad and Monica Gandhi. Meanwhile, Prasad dives further and further into the far-right anti-vax conspiracy theorist cesspool, echoing their catchphrases and buzzwords without a second thought.
After making a mockery of medical ethics, randomized control trials, and pretending the laws of medical science could be seamlessly applied to engineering science, in contradiction to his own published writing in 2015, UCSF's Vinay Prasad would attempt time and time again in 2023 to form "calls to action" that ended in pitiful whimpers. Oddly enough, what is Prasad still pissing about? We've repeatedly infected all the children, everyone's sicker, there's hardly anyone left masking, and booster vaccine uptake is minimal. Everything's worse now - and Prasad personally profited from crusading for this outcome.
The mountain of professional and ethical incompetence Vinay Prasad has produced since the spring of 2020 is staggering. Compiled into a single document, his progression from Ioannidis sycophant into full-blown wannabe anti-vax celebrity is staggering. The cowardice of University of California San Francisco Dean Talmadge King to condemn this reckless profiteering is staggering and frankly, quite embarrassing. Giving medical advice regarding vaccines over the Internet under the guise of pseudo-scientific "pledges" demanding an RCT, the ethics violations are more than enough to put Vinay Prasad's medical license under review for grave misconduct - people are looking at Vinay’s credentials and trust his unyielding social media rants as reliable medical advice, trashing their health in the process.
This destructive grift has to come to an end.
