The Willful Ignorance & Pandemic Mismanagement of Shira Doron
The Willful Ignorance & Pandemic Mismanagement of Shira Doron
Delusions Around Asymptomatic COVID-19 Are Indefensible
Yet another absolutely deranged COVID related opinion editorial has appeared in the Washington Post, this time by Dr. Shira Doron, who was featured in a previous profile on Leana Wen. Shira Doron is the “Chief Infection Control Officer” for Tufts Medicine and a vocally contrarian MD who apparently has abandoned her humanity, finding solidarity with a deadly and disabling virus that has killed and maimed millions of her fellow Americans - even going so far to endorse the rightoid conspiracy theory that COVID deaths are vastly overcounted, even after the evidence shows that we are likely undercounting deaths by 15-30%.
Background
Shira Doron is a highly dedicated bad faith actor - she has never done a “cost-benefit analysis” and has a zealous commitment to opposing any sort of infection prevention measures, writing off the mountain of dead and disabled bodies now and in the future as simply inevitable - which is pretty astounding from someone whose profession is supposedly saving lives. At that point, wouldn’t you just retire and sit at home, instead of collecting a paycheck for the equivalent of pissing up a well?
Doron’s never factored Long COVID disability in any of her analysis, something which has driven millions of Americans out of the workforce. She’s been frequently quoted in national media by hack frauds like David Leonhardt of the New York Times, who constantly digs through Twitter to find the most random and unqualified jackasses to source for quotes, including pediatrician trainee Alasdair Munro from the United Kingdom, profiled here. Doron loves to push this fantasy that SARS-CoV-2 is just a happy little bug that goes in one ear and out the earth, that infection is inevitable, and that SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t actually kill people, leading to a mountain of falsely reported deaths of people that just so happened to have asymptomatic COVID.
It’s an utterly delusional, and frankly illiterate fantasy - the core of the “with/from” conspiracy theory that has all the pro-viral influencers howling like a pack of rabid hyenas. On top of that, Shira since mid-2021 has been screeching that “preventing inventions among children [is] no longer the goal,” long before child vaccines were available - and now COVID-19 is the leading disease killer and disabler of children in America, with a majority of them still unvaccinated. Great job, Shira!
Ending the Five-Day Isolation Guidelines?
Believe it or not, America used to actually understand the necessity of preventing infections of a deadly and disabling virus. The CDC established 10-day isolation guidelines for the infected, even though many are still infectious for up to two weeks. Before people develop symptoms of COVID-19, they can be asymptomatic infectious - and unknowingly infect others, forming the chains of transmission that have killed and disabled millions of Americans in just a few short years. The CEO of Delta Airlines, who has zero medical expertise or experience and has never cracked open a medical textbook or donned scrubs, lobbied to shorten this isolation guideline to 5 days. Anthony Fauci went on television to defend this delusional change, claiming it would “preserve societal function.” Needless calamity has followed.
Now, Shira Doron has taken to the Washington Post to demand no isolation guidelines whatsoever, in a disgustingly pathetic pro-viral OpEd, since she didn’t do enough damage guest-starring in Leana’s previous trash. She boldly assumes that you’re functionally illiterate, linking to an article from NPR that says COVID is deadlier than the flu, to claim the “risk from death…have dropped below that of the flu.” Which is odd, because according to Dr. David Gorski of Science Based Medicine, it’s actually a leading cause of death among children, which the flu is… not. From his article titled “COVID-19 is a leading cause of death among children, but that doesn’t stop some of my colleagues from arguing against vaccinating them:”
I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, as I’ve been reminding my colleagues who are shocked at how many doctors are antivaccine that such antivax docs have always been among us, but the intensity and degree of the pushback among colleagues against vaccinating children against COVID-19 and their utter obliviousness that the arguments they were making were nothing more than old antivax arguments indistinguishable from the arguments antivaxxers used to make about measles vaccines surprised even me. What particularly surprised and disappointed me is the degree to which seemingly eminent academic physicians, while showing concern about reports of myocarditis after vaccination, seemingly shrug their shoulders about the disease, thinking it seemingly “natural and healthy” for children to die of a vaccine-preventable disease.
Now in 2023, we have a massive number of bodies that were killed or disabled after COVID-19 vaccination. Not as bad as 2020, but still staggering and cause for alarm, and taking infection prevention seriously. What Doron doesn’t tell you is the death isn’t the only negative outcome, and if you wind up crippled by SARS-CoV-2, this is the future that awaits you from Larry Buhl in Capital & Main:
Not knowing when or if she’ll be able to go back to work, Marie (who asked that her last name not be used for fear of reprisal from the Social Security Administration) began pursuing long term disability coverage and is also applying for disability coverage through Social Security. “[My lawyer] said, ‘Expect to be denied, especially because it’s long COVID,’” she said.
Or from Long COVID patient Laura Miers:
I am 41. Because childcare costs more than college, I stayed home with my kids. I planned to rejoin the workforce in 2020, when my youngest started school. In 2020, Covid disabled me. Now I’m too sick to work, & my retirement options are remarriage, expatriation, or death.
Yeah, that’s something we should tell people it’s “inevitable” to roll the dice on, multiple times a year. Right. Thus, taking out pro-infection OpEds is not only irresponsible, but completely indefensible. Infection prevention measures are still critical, and thus must be strictly mandated and enforced - vaccines help, but we have multiple years of evidence that they can’t shoulder all the burden alone, at least for now - new and better vaccines & treatments are under development, another fact that Doron conveniently omits. Instead, she opens with a blatantly false lie:
Thanks to vaccines, post-infection immunity and effective treatments for covid-19, most of society has returned to normal.
Ah yes, the child on their fifth COVID-19 reinfection, now suffering from cognitive and neurological impairment, has truly “returned to normal” with their “natural immunity.” Doron is so terrified of facing reality that she’s willing to throw children’s health in a meatgrinder to perpetuate a delusion.
We believe it’s time for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to retire that policy and move to an alternative guidance: Stay home when sick; return to work and school when you are better.
Small problem, Shira. If you are infectious with SARS-CoV-2, even if not feeling sick, guess what? You are sick. You are a freaking doctor! You know this! Illness isn’t just what you are personally feeling, and denying the reality of asymptomatic transmission, when symptomatic COVID-19 is bookended by a period of asymptomatic illness, is outright science denial. Washington Post should be retracting this opinion editorial for dangerous fiction masquerading as science.
Shira’s Fantasies of a Happy Little Virus, Children’s Best Friend
Doron’s article also completely ignores that people show up to work with symptomatic illness including coughs and wheezing all the time and proceed to infect their coworkers (and those coworkers’ families.) Parents have also sent sick and infectious children to school, before and even during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic - 1 in 4 parents, as a matter of fact, have lied about their child’s COVID-19 infection before sending them to infect classmates and their families with a deadly and disabling virus. Now, COVID-19 is the leading disease killer of children, and hundreds of thousands of American children have lost a primary caregiver thanks to COVID-19, often bringing home the disease from school. Shira has this to say instead:
This is especially important for kids. Extensive evidence shows that time away from school due to covid has worsened learning loss, screen addiction, the teen mental health crisis and obesity rates. Schools are playing catch-up not only for academics but also social and emotional learning. While many schools have been open for in-person instruction for more than two years, the mandatory five-day isolation period means educational disruptions continue.
Shira Doron fails to mention any of the facts around child death and suffering in her OpEd because she doesn’t care about the suffering or trauma of children, much less their academic performance - bereavement is one of the leading contributors to child academic hardship. What this article also does not examine is how summer and winter vacations might contribute to this - in fact, why let kids visit home at all? Keep them in school at all times - we’ve already designed them to resemble prisons.
It is incumbent upon health officials to keep the number of days that children have to be out of school to an absolute minimum. We also must recognize that it’s not only children who are harmed by the five-day isolation requirements, but also the caregivers of children who are too young to stay alone at home. During this time of staffing shortages across many industries, especially in health care, we must consider this negative impact on society.
This is too moronic and narrow-minded to take seriously. Imagine a classroom of 30 children, packed in like sardines. If one child shows up with COVID-19 and infects the rest of them, repeated several times a year, the cumulative learning loss for the collective class is a disaster. Strict infection prevention protocols - including PPE, HEPA filtration, and ventilation actually work to keep more children in school for longer. Repeatedly infecting them with COVID-19 and then sending them back to school whilst infectious to infect the rest of the class, is a net-negative amount of time spent learning. Of course, Shira never bothers to ask a single working teacher what a disaster the past years of Infinity COVID has done to children’s education.
To think you actually expect a sick child to pay attention in school and retain information whilst sick with COVID-19, is even more jarring. Meanwhile, here’s what the virus is doing within their brain as they struggle to pay attention:
Again, completely ignored by pro-disease sage Shira Doron. Instead, she whines about “staffing shortages” which… are caused by SARS-CoV-2 infections. The willful ignorance on display here is staggering. We’re talking a total detachment from reality and the harms of COVID infection, instead fearmongering about prevention to such a degree that it actually causes more cumulative harm to the population.
Going on, Shira Doron goes to the mat for incredibly hamfisted arguments that SARS-CoV-2, a virus that has disabled millions of Americans and is linked to organ damage, including in the heart and brain, is actually just like influenza. Latest research, from April 8th, 2023, shows this is obviously not the case. Shira Doron proves herself to be completely illiterate on SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19, because COVID is clearly not the flu. If she’s this brazen in public, there’s no guarantee of patient safety for those under her care. There’s simply no excuse for being this delusional in Year 4 of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, and it’s putting children’s lives at risk.
Shira also bemoans testing, saying it should be limited to “high-risk” people instead of healthy children. 1-in-4 kids have a pre-existing condition, and hundreds of thousands of children who used to be healthy are now suffering from Long COVID disability. Again, Shira Doron pretends this simply doesn’t exist and doesn’t matter - and says that only the immunocompromised need high-quality-masks. Everyone else should freely get and spread a brain-eating bat virus around, undercutting the effectiveness of said high-quality masks for the immunocompromised, who would tell Shira that if she ever bothered to ask them instead of embarrassing herself.
An Unforgivable Facade of “Normalcy”
We have been through the unimaginable, and our kids have borne much of the burden. Now we must do everything we can to ensure they are where they belong: in the classroom. As the emergency phase ends across the United States, it’s time to shift our covid policies to match those of other endemic respiratory viruses: Stay at home when sick and, whether it takes a week or a few days, come back when you are feeling better.
This is utterly deranged and sadistic. Kids getting COVID several times a year and suffering permanent brain and heart damage that can result in cognitive impairment, chronic fatigue, or other disabilities is not keeping them in a classroom, and worse, it’s denying them of their future. Strict COVID mitigations to prevent infections in the classroom would keep children in the classroom, instead of sick at home, crippled, or dead - none of these outcomes are mentioned in Shira Doron’s calls for what is little more than an Infinity-COVID screed. This virus, that has upended millions upon millions of lives, has found countless incredibly vocal advocates in support of the virus’ ability to do unimaginable harms.
Shira Doron also shows her complete lack of understanding of SARS-CoV-2, as COVID is not an “endemic” “respiratory” virus. It is a rapidly mutating, airborne, socially transmitted vascular virus that attacks every organ in the body, including the brain - the central organ children employ when learning in the classroom. Shira Doron does not care about children, learning, or “normalcy.” She cares about constructing a facade of normalcy built atop a mountain of suffering made up of dead, crippled, and orphaned children that are supposed to be protected by doctors & other adults.
Even worse, these orphaned children are disproportionately Native, Black, and brown - making Shira a vocal crusader for structural white supremacy by employing a virus to kneecap the health and development of non-white children. Shira Doron and the Washington Post are demanding that children suffer and die in darkness for a fantasy that is completely detached from reality and the work that needs to be done to save lives - Shira’s central task as a medical doctor.
We have zero justification for continuing to throw bodies into a meatgrinder so the well off can indulge a fantasy of luxury and White folk can piss off to a fancy drunken brunch atop the backs of a permanent viral underclass. These perversions must be snuffed out with haste, saving as many lives and futures as we can.