I was an adviser to a number of schools and school districts from 2020-2022. At one of my first faculty Q&A sessions where I was promoting re-opening, I was asked “Who will pay for a monument to all the dead teachers?” The fear is the fault of the public health authorities, as well as the decision to place someone with zero public health background in charge of national COVID policy.
These are generally bad people doing generally bad things. There are few other ways to explain this. Watching the two of them try to memory-hole their noxious acts with the willing compliance of the press is not surprising -- but the collapse of any kind of press independence is is among the great disappointments of my life.
Luckily, many have archived the soon-to-disappear multitudinous statements by the two of them that show what liars they are (and have been -- just different lies now). I tend toward seeing the best in people, but there is no best in some -- and these are two of the best examples. Deborah Birx is another one that did enormous damage -- she was responsible for the lockdowns that Fauxi and Weingarten then trumpeted incessantly. But she (CIA operative) has always managed to slither away to do damage elsewhere. Read Scott Atlas' book for a galling, I-was-there report.
Meanwhile, my MD brother in law still wants us to mask up on the plane if we visit them in the Bay Area this summer. And, in the hotel elevator but not while we are eating unless it’s a place with poor ventilation. We have politely declined the offer.
Thank God for that father. These people need to be in jail. I want my pound of flesh. But a secret meno must have gone out. Trudeau, to Fauci to Weingarten are running like the cowards that they are. And the media plays air cover by not calling then out.
We knew they would try to re-write history, but I continue to be disappointed in the media for letting them off the hook time and time again. Most importantly, Vinay, I'm begging you to please shave the beard!!! You are far too handsome to cover your face like that.
IMO greatest failure in the HHS and CDC response was to implement a national COVID registry to support continuous and concurrent health system learning and develop, publish, and update best clinical practice and inform public policy. This registry didn’t happen - except to some extent in DoD. The rest of the learning disaster was downstream and now in our wake. The focus should be on how to prevent this disaster from happening again.
I, too, advised my small town (through various media outlets) to stop making kids mask, re-open schools, and to NOT vaccinate their children. The level of vitriol from other physicians was shocking. I told them they could have a Coke and a smile for all I cared...they obviously had let go of any semblance of clinical reasoning, paying no attention to the lack of clinical data.
My clinic BOOMED with new patients, all leaving the aforementioned physicians who spent two years in haz-mat suits and fired unvaccinated patients.
Hi Vinay. I'm new here, so please excuse me if my comment is a little out of tune with your opinions. This is your house!
The issue of closing schools has to be remembered within the imperatives of that unique, terrifying moment back in March 2020. And it was terrifying if you recall. No PPE. Only a sketchy understanding of a novel, lethal, and often disabling virus. The suspicion that this thing could be airborne. Anecdotes are powerful, and give a human scale to the big numbers. One of my friends, a 52 yo Ob/Gyn, was among the first people I knew to catch it back in early March. Despite being in great physical shape and with no major health problems, he spent a month on a ventilator, then ECMO, yet somehow survived. Inpatient rehab and all the rest for 6 months before he made it home. He is now cognitively and physically disabled, and cannot practice anymore. His family fell apart. Many of my patients are teachers. One of them contracted Covid early on from her students, and also spent months in the hospital. She eventually needed a lung transplant, and her life has been upended. Breathless, immunosuppressed, and unemployable. A lot of people died, of course. Doctors and teachers. Millions of Americans.
People can look back and try to improve the process for the next pandemic, which will probably arrive sooner than we'd like to admit. But closing schools (at least until PPE production could be secured, the virus better investigated, and the most vulnerable members of society given at least a modicum of protection) was an act of community beneficence. Did it screw up some kids? Yes. Would the virus killing/disabling many of their teachers, parents, and grandparents also have screwed up the fabric of society? Yes.
"RCTs of masking? School reopening? Distancing? Cohorting? Busing? Ventilation?" Imagine how much time this would have taken to set up in 2020, with results when? How are you ethically going to do this when you know teachers will be the real time cannon fodder? In April 2023 we know a lot more, and it seems that the majority of studies in the NEJM, JAMA, and other professional journals have been pumping out the knowledge over these past 3 years. That's how medical knowledge is built and reinforced. Not Fauci figuring everything out by himself, or imposing himself like some dictator over the massive independent research infrastructure of our hospitals, universities, pharma, and laboratories.
"School closure has already destroyed a generation of kids." I'm sorry you feel this way. It's true that many have suffered, and a couple years of their normal childhoods have been disturbed or missed. 4th grade was one of my favorites growing up, and my daughter's experience of it was less than Disney magical. She will never get that back. But kids are resilient. They have not been destroyed. On the contrary, their sacrifices with remote schooling on behalf of the society as a whole can be framed for them as heroic, selfless, and altruistic.
A generation of kids is being destroyed in Ukraine. That's unfathomable destruction. Yet even there, the human spirit in these kids, many orphaned, I suspect will blazingly triumph like it did in Europe after two world wars. People, and kids in particular, have a capacity for strength that we parents deprive them of when we treat them like snowflakes that can't be called to duty. Sometimes, early in a pandemic, "duty" is to shelter in place until we can go on the offensive. Remember our hospitals on the verge of collapse? Mine was. Refrigerator trucks outside hospital morgues, and mass graves in other countries? And by buying some time for Operation Warp Speed, we achieved a historic accomplishment. A vaccine in record time that has saved well over 3 million lives, prevented 18 million hospitalizations, saved $1 trillion in medical costs in the US alone:
"The virus was comparable to other viruses in healthy children, and no one should have disrupted their lives." I think this is not accurate. Depending on the age cohort, Covid was the 5th to 8th leading cause of death in kids over these years. MISC and long Covid are not like other viruses. We might be seeing even longer term effects of repeat Covid infections emerging in kids. Neurodevelopmental, cardiovascular, endocrine, etc... Data does show the vast majority of kids do fine, I agree. But their lives were going to be disrupted one way or another with a global pandemic unlike anything we've seen since the influenza pandemic a hundred years ago.
As far as scapegoating and second guessing new fall guys like Fauci, who probably did the best they could managing an impossible-to-please-everyone situation... it doesn't seem productive. What does seem productive is collecting all that we've learned, establishing best practices that are INCLUSIVE of children's overall well-being and education, but not EXCLUSIVE of the very real risks to their teachers, families, and society at large. Kids can handle a lot. They did handle a lot, and they are doing great now when I look around at my daughter's classmates. Catching up, and with a newfound appreciation for making sacrifices for the greater good.
The common good.
I think of my kid and her classmates as freaking heroes in this whole mess. I thank them for their sacrifice.
Is it okay to say I LOVE YOU DR PRASAD!!? ( my husband knows...😉) You stood up for the kids from DAY ONE. I will be eternally grateful. Big hug from 🇨🇦.
It is always easy to destroy policy retrospectively. Early in the pandemic we had very limited understanding of the virus, proportion of people who would get really sick, need ICU and there was varied information on how it was spread. Remember how long CDC took to acknowledge airborne spread. Remember the scenes in Italy- what was happening in hospitals.... remember London hospitals, refrigeration trucks in New York. Some of the school closure drive came from an intent to slow spread, some was an attempt at zero covid- flawed in retrospect. We had PPE shortages and no treatments. We didn’t know how to manage patients in ICU, we didn’t know steroids helped. I think you have conflated the retrospectoscope that everything should have been obvious instantly- I don’t think it was. I have young kids. I didn’t like school closures but as a physician I supported that policy in Australia at the time.
Speaking of bad policies, we in LA have had to live with numerous bad policies mandated by Barbara Ferrer and she is being sued over mask mandates as well as her other bad policies.
Vinay, I would be interested in your opinion about Norman Fenton's (Prof of Risk at Imperial College London) May 2nd Substack post (Where are the numbers?) about a population survey carried out during the vaccine roleout. He says that the apparent efficacy of the vaccine (in reducing infections) is just a result of counting infections in the first few weeks after vaccination as infections in the unvaxed. Is this correct? Is it true that they were allowed to do this? Please comment.
I was an adviser to a number of schools and school districts from 2020-2022. At one of my first faculty Q&A sessions where I was promoting re-opening, I was asked “Who will pay for a monument to all the dead teachers?” The fear is the fault of the public health authorities, as well as the decision to place someone with zero public health background in charge of national COVID policy.
These are generally bad people doing generally bad things. There are few other ways to explain this. Watching the two of them try to memory-hole their noxious acts with the willing compliance of the press is not surprising -- but the collapse of any kind of press independence is is among the great disappointments of my life.
Luckily, many have archived the soon-to-disappear multitudinous statements by the two of them that show what liars they are (and have been -- just different lies now). I tend toward seeing the best in people, but there is no best in some -- and these are two of the best examples. Deborah Birx is another one that did enormous damage -- she was responsible for the lockdowns that Fauxi and Weingarten then trumpeted incessantly. But she (CIA operative) has always managed to slither away to do damage elsewhere. Read Scott Atlas' book for a galling, I-was-there report.
Meanwhile, my MD brother in law still wants us to mask up on the plane if we visit them in the Bay Area this summer. And, in the hotel elevator but not while we are eating unless it’s a place with poor ventilation. We have politely declined the offer.
You are correct and it is very disheartening. But your telling of the facts keeps a light on it. Thank you. I do believe it helps!
Media are complicit with the initial harm and now the cover up. How do we hold all parties accountable when their lies are published as fact?
Thank God for that father. These people need to be in jail. I want my pound of flesh. But a secret meno must have gone out. Trudeau, to Fauci to Weingarten are running like the cowards that they are. And the media plays air cover by not calling then out.
We knew they would try to re-write history, but I continue to be disappointed in the media for letting them off the hook time and time again. Most importantly, Vinay, I'm begging you to please shave the beard!!! You are far too handsome to cover your face like that.
IMO greatest failure in the HHS and CDC response was to implement a national COVID registry to support continuous and concurrent health system learning and develop, publish, and update best clinical practice and inform public policy. This registry didn’t happen - except to some extent in DoD. The rest of the learning disaster was downstream and now in our wake. The focus should be on how to prevent this disaster from happening again.
The facts were there from the beginning . The truth is , that the “ science” did not fit the narrative.
And now, the back pedaling continues by those that choose to push their lies and personal agency into the space of : “ we didn’t know better.”
Shameful and shameless behaviors.
I, too, advised my small town (through various media outlets) to stop making kids mask, re-open schools, and to NOT vaccinate their children. The level of vitriol from other physicians was shocking. I told them they could have a Coke and a smile for all I cared...they obviously had let go of any semblance of clinical reasoning, paying no attention to the lack of clinical data.
My clinic BOOMED with new patients, all leaving the aforementioned physicians who spent two years in haz-mat suits and fired unvaccinated patients.
Hi Vinay. I'm new here, so please excuse me if my comment is a little out of tune with your opinions. This is your house!
The issue of closing schools has to be remembered within the imperatives of that unique, terrifying moment back in March 2020. And it was terrifying if you recall. No PPE. Only a sketchy understanding of a novel, lethal, and often disabling virus. The suspicion that this thing could be airborne. Anecdotes are powerful, and give a human scale to the big numbers. One of my friends, a 52 yo Ob/Gyn, was among the first people I knew to catch it back in early March. Despite being in great physical shape and with no major health problems, he spent a month on a ventilator, then ECMO, yet somehow survived. Inpatient rehab and all the rest for 6 months before he made it home. He is now cognitively and physically disabled, and cannot practice anymore. His family fell apart. Many of my patients are teachers. One of them contracted Covid early on from her students, and also spent months in the hospital. She eventually needed a lung transplant, and her life has been upended. Breathless, immunosuppressed, and unemployable. A lot of people died, of course. Doctors and teachers. Millions of Americans.
People can look back and try to improve the process for the next pandemic, which will probably arrive sooner than we'd like to admit. But closing schools (at least until PPE production could be secured, the virus better investigated, and the most vulnerable members of society given at least a modicum of protection) was an act of community beneficence. Did it screw up some kids? Yes. Would the virus killing/disabling many of their teachers, parents, and grandparents also have screwed up the fabric of society? Yes.
"RCTs of masking? School reopening? Distancing? Cohorting? Busing? Ventilation?" Imagine how much time this would have taken to set up in 2020, with results when? How are you ethically going to do this when you know teachers will be the real time cannon fodder? In April 2023 we know a lot more, and it seems that the majority of studies in the NEJM, JAMA, and other professional journals have been pumping out the knowledge over these past 3 years. That's how medical knowledge is built and reinforced. Not Fauci figuring everything out by himself, or imposing himself like some dictator over the massive independent research infrastructure of our hospitals, universities, pharma, and laboratories.
"School closure has already destroyed a generation of kids." I'm sorry you feel this way. It's true that many have suffered, and a couple years of their normal childhoods have been disturbed or missed. 4th grade was one of my favorites growing up, and my daughter's experience of it was less than Disney magical. She will never get that back. But kids are resilient. They have not been destroyed. On the contrary, their sacrifices with remote schooling on behalf of the society as a whole can be framed for them as heroic, selfless, and altruistic.
A generation of kids is being destroyed in Ukraine. That's unfathomable destruction. Yet even there, the human spirit in these kids, many orphaned, I suspect will blazingly triumph like it did in Europe after two world wars. People, and kids in particular, have a capacity for strength that we parents deprive them of when we treat them like snowflakes that can't be called to duty. Sometimes, early in a pandemic, "duty" is to shelter in place until we can go on the offensive. Remember our hospitals on the verge of collapse? Mine was. Refrigerator trucks outside hospital morgues, and mass graves in other countries? And by buying some time for Operation Warp Speed, we achieved a historic accomplishment. A vaccine in record time that has saved well over 3 million lives, prevented 18 million hospitalizations, saved $1 trillion in medical costs in the US alone:
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/blog/2022/two-years-covid-vaccines-prevented-millions-deaths-hospitalizations
"The virus was comparable to other viruses in healthy children, and no one should have disrupted their lives." I think this is not accurate. Depending on the age cohort, Covid was the 5th to 8th leading cause of death in kids over these years. MISC and long Covid are not like other viruses. We might be seeing even longer term effects of repeat Covid infections emerging in kids. Neurodevelopmental, cardiovascular, endocrine, etc... Data does show the vast majority of kids do fine, I agree. But their lives were going to be disrupted one way or another with a global pandemic unlike anything we've seen since the influenza pandemic a hundred years ago.
As far as scapegoating and second guessing new fall guys like Fauci, who probably did the best they could managing an impossible-to-please-everyone situation... it doesn't seem productive. What does seem productive is collecting all that we've learned, establishing best practices that are INCLUSIVE of children's overall well-being and education, but not EXCLUSIVE of the very real risks to their teachers, families, and society at large. Kids can handle a lot. They did handle a lot, and they are doing great now when I look around at my daughter's classmates. Catching up, and with a newfound appreciation for making sacrifices for the greater good.
The common good.
I think of my kid and her classmates as freaking heroes in this whole mess. I thank them for their sacrifice.
Is it okay to say I LOVE YOU DR PRASAD!!? ( my husband knows...😉) You stood up for the kids from DAY ONE. I will be eternally grateful. Big hug from 🇨🇦.
It is always easy to destroy policy retrospectively. Early in the pandemic we had very limited understanding of the virus, proportion of people who would get really sick, need ICU and there was varied information on how it was spread. Remember how long CDC took to acknowledge airborne spread. Remember the scenes in Italy- what was happening in hospitals.... remember London hospitals, refrigeration trucks in New York. Some of the school closure drive came from an intent to slow spread, some was an attempt at zero covid- flawed in retrospect. We had PPE shortages and no treatments. We didn’t know how to manage patients in ICU, we didn’t know steroids helped. I think you have conflated the retrospectoscope that everything should have been obvious instantly- I don’t think it was. I have young kids. I didn’t like school closures but as a physician I supported that policy in Australia at the time.
Speaking of bad policies, we in LA have had to live with numerous bad policies mandated by Barbara Ferrer and she is being sued over mask mandates as well as her other bad policies.
https://www.change.org/p/los-angeles-county-board-of-supervisors-to-los-angeles-bos-fire-barbara-ferrer
You can donate to this worthy lawsuit here: https://www.laparents.org/donate
What a good piece. I will forward to friends.
Vinay, I would be interested in your opinion about Norman Fenton's (Prof of Risk at Imperial College London) May 2nd Substack post (Where are the numbers?) about a population survey carried out during the vaccine roleout. He says that the apparent efficacy of the vaccine (in reducing infections) is just a result of counting infections in the first few weeks after vaccination as infections in the unvaxed. Is this correct? Is it true that they were allowed to do this? Please comment.