THE LIST: 118 Organizations, Institutions, Individuals, and Tools that UCSF's Vinay Prasad Has Attacked

An Embarrassing History of Outrage Farming

Can you even trust this guy with basic first aid?

Recently and rather unfortunately, the Trump Administration has foolishly elected to cherry-pick University of California San Francisco Professor Vinay Prasad, an oncologist with an obnoxious obsession of insulting others on social media, to defend their crusade to cripple and humiliate the National Institute of Health, one of the world's leading centers for medical and scientific research. Prasad has received not a single NIH grant and has zero real-world experience working with the NIH.

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This was a very foolish choice for the Trump Administration to make. As a loudmouthed crank who has destroyed his own reputation amongst medical & scientific professionals in order to profit from the modern anti-vaccine movement and their war against public health, Vinay Prasad has unleashed a pitiful torrent of unprofessional, childish personal attacks against nearly every target imaginable. The Administration of the University of California San Francisco has refused to condemn this completely unacceptable misconduct.

Here is a list compiling the incredibly broad range of Prasad's targets for outrage farming amongst his anti-vax fanbase on social media:

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Institutions (19):

Vinay Prasad is celebrating thousands of scientific researchers losing their jobs. Now who will perform all the RCTs he spent years demanding?

1. National Institute of Health ("zero RCTs", "run incompetently,” “research is silly”)

2. NIH Researchers (falsely accused of living large on taxpayer $)

3. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

4. CDC ("I would fire at least 10,000 people")

5. CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices ("mediocre group of scientists")

6. CDC's Morbidity & Morality Weekly Report ("propaganda newsletter")

7. CDC MMWR study on LongCovid in kids (“trash”)

8. Health & Human Services Department (he endorses RFK Jr. to lead it)

9. FEMA (for providing COVID-19 Funeral Assistance)

10. FDA ("a corrupt entity that needs to be entirely renovated [by RFK Jr.]")

11. California Health & Human Services

12. UCSF Hospitals, Vinay Prasad’s employer (instituted a mask mandate)

13. The University of Minnesota (accused of corruption)

14. Philadelphia Schools District (for a day of virtual learning due to toxic wildfire smoke)

15. Australia (for preventing COVID-19 outbreaks until a vaccine was available)

16. World Health Organization ("You just make shit up")

17. USAID (funded research that caused the COVID-19 pandemic, apparently)

18. Johns Hopkins University

19. Harvard University (resisting Trump’s funding cuts)

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Organizations (14):

Vinay Prasad has zero experience in pediatrics. He just wants unvaccinated kids infected with SARS-CoV-2 over and over.

1. American Academy of Pediatrics ("should be abolished")

2. NYC Health+ Mobile Test to Treat (said they should give Prozac to those infected with COVID-19)

3. Nature Medicine (“just publishes garbage long covid studies”)

4. Hospitals with mask mandates ("dehumanizing")

5. Child-sized n95 manufacturers

6. Putrino Lab (accused them of scamming, demanded they return grant funding)

7. New England Journal of Medicine

8. STAT's Infectious Disease Experts ("not good thinkers")

9. Peer reviewed journals publishing Long COVID studies

10. People's CDC

11. Teachers' Unions ("good riddance")

12. Pfizer

13. Moderna

14. LinkedIn (removed his post calling to defund mRNA vaccine research)

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Individuals (23):

1. Fmr. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky (blamed her for RFK Jr's success)

2. Fmr. CDC Director Mandy Cohen

3. Fmr. Surgeon General Jerome Adams ("panicked" in 2020)

4. Fmr. FDA Director Dr. Robert M. Califf

5. Fmr. NIH Acting Director Laurence Tabak (accused of COVID origins coverup)

6. Dr. Anthony Fauci

7. Dr. Galucomflecken (implied he was responsible for UnitedHealth CEO’s murder)

8. Dr. Peter Hotez (a frequent target of Prasad’s, said RFK Jr. would “destroy him”)

9. Dr. Deepti Gurdasani (implied she was mentally ill)

10. Dr. David Fisman (for supporting a teacher's union)

11. Dr. Ziyad al-Aly (Long COVID researcher)

12. Dr. Ellie Murray (for proving that mask mandates work)

13. Dr. Jonathan Howard (“just trying to make money from selling a book”)

14. Dr. Taylor Nichols (falsely declared a liar on ZDoggMD)

15. Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist (accused of slander, publicly threatened)

16. Dr. Peter Marks

17. A dermatology resident at University of Washington

18. Mehdi Hasan, Journalist ("a dunce")

19. Laurie Garrett, Journalist (“crazy shit,” a frequent target of Prasad's)

20. Tara Helle, Journalist

21. Ed Yong, Journalist ("Invented Long COVID")

22. Apoorva Manavilli (“terrible science reporter,” “wrong about deaths and hospitalizations by MASSIVE numbers”)

23. A journalist who pointed out anti-Indian racism from a DOGE employee

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Tools (24):

The COVID-19 pandemic has always been a joke to Vinay Prasad.

1. COVID-19 Vaccine

2. Pediatric COVID-19 Vaccines for 5-11 Year Olds

3. Yearly COVID Vaccine

4. COVID-19 Vaccine Boosters

5. Intranasal COVID Vaccine

6. The COVID-19 Vaccine for pregnant women

7. Vaccine mandates

8. Paxlovid, a COVID-19 antiviral ("billions wasted")

9. C02 Monitors (“irrational anxiety”)

10. N95 Respirators

11. Child-sized KF94 Respirators, blaming the CDC & AAP

12. Respirators to Protect from Toxic Wildfire Smoke ("Mental Illness")

13. Flo Mask

14. Mask mandates

15. HEPA Ventilation

16. Corsi-Rosenthal Boxes

17. Asymptomatic testing ("smash every test")

18. Improved ventilation standards

19. FarUVC lighting

20. Policy to prevent SARS-CoV-2 Transmission (“It’s a cold. toughen up.”)

21. Lung cancer screening

22. COVID-19 research studies after 2022 (“a jobs program for upper-middle class people”)

23. Hospitals preventing families from being infected by COVID-19 by hospitalized loved ones in 2020 (“violated deep human intuitions”)

24. Measles boosters (“a culture where adults are paranoid & get boosters”)

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Figments of Prasad’s Imagination (14):

1. "Any strong advocate for Kids covid vaccination is off their rocker"

2. "A tiny fraction of people...suffering from long pandemic."

3. "Idiots on Twitter trying to slow spread of Covid in kids"

4. "Covid Influencers"

5. "zero COVID zealots who cannot read research"

6. "The Misinformation Police"

7. "Mask and vaccine politics in California"

8. "Testing Profiteers"

9. "Laboratory scientific experts"

10. "Mask Zealots"

11. ”Covid-19 Zealots”

12. ”COVID Tyrants...Pieces of Shit...Still Lying”

13. "Future public health tyrants"

14. “Left wing science journals”

15. “Disruptions to global transit and society”

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Groups & Concepts (24):

1. Anyone trying to avoid COVID-19 ("...is stupid")

2. Academic researchers ("do shit science and live off NIH grants")

3. Public health deans (for not promoting his obviously biased paper)

4. Doctors who advocate for pediatric COVID boosters ("committing malpractice")

5. Doctors critical of RFK Jr. and his extensive anti-vaccine history

6. Concerned parents as "panicking" and "hysterical"

7. Scientists who didn't perform the RCTs he demanded

8. Scientists who tested the pediatric COVID-19 vaccine

9. Kids being hospitalized by COVID-19 are apparently "imaginary"

10. Critics of Unpasteurized ("raw") Milk Consumption

11. Critics of anti-vax grifter RFK Jr.

12. Critics of "the Cochrane Review on Masks" (long debunked)

13. Critics of Leana Wen, a Brookings Institute lobbyist

14. Critics of "immunity debt" (a complete *fiction*)

15. Critics of RCT Zealotry

16. Public health officials (“should lose your trust”)

17. Studies linking COVID-19 to brain damage

18. Long COVID disability (“Long COVID mental illness”)

19. Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions

20. Working From Home

21. Federal funding for the Humanities

22. Democrats who voted against Jay Bhattacharya for NIH Director

23. Cancer therapeutic vaccine research

24. Universities (“failing the social bargain”)

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A Dishonest Day’s Work

It should be shameful that a medical professor talks in the same tone as a racist gamer who literally lives in filth and cockroaches.

What Vinay Prasad is doing to medicine and science is what Youtube, Twitter, and other social media platforms have enabled for discussions around entertainment media like films, videogames, and even professional wrestling for many years now.

It’s called outrage farming. It’s become an entire industry at this point.

You’re likely well acquainted with it by now - whether it’s screeching that “woke” has ruined Star Wars, that videogames don’t have enough bikini babes anymore, or that All Elite Wrestling is going bankrupt in two weeks - there’s no end of exploitative, chatGPT-brained slop on social media meant to drum up hate - and Vinay Prasad has brought this to medicine. He enjoys cultivating a fanbase that openly drools for blood and fire in the streets:

Prasad wanted Trump elected to realize his followers’ perverse fantasies, inspired by Vinay’s unyielding provocations.

The problem here is that nobody dies if a bad videogame is released, a blockbuster film is underwhelming, or an episode of Dynamite doesn’t pop a 9/10 rating on Cagematch. Countless Americans died of COVID-19, in no small part because they were fed an endless torrent of fiction that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was harmless and benign, and that the real killers are doctors, vaccines, and public health.

Vinay Prasad of the University of California San Francisco has personally profited from contributing to this torrent of hate, and his obsession with stoking the flames of hate against his colleagues has no place in any medical or scientific setting. There are many hardworking doctors, nurses, and scientists at UCSF that shouldn’t have to share their workplace with someone who profits from fanning the flames of hatred on social media that have ended in harassment and bomb threats in the real world.

If you find this sort of exploitative misconduct concerning, here is the contact page for the UCSF Office of Faculty and Academic affairs. Feel free to make your voice heard, after far too many have been silenced by the harassment & abuse that Vinay Prasad has enabled.

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