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.
I’m a teacher and I begged to go back. Many teacher friends were terrified. All I could tell them was “turn off the tv!” Not that they listened to me. Now we all feel bad because the kids are a mess.
Fauci is an infectious disease and immunology expert, NOT a public policy expert. Please read Scott Atlas's book, A Plague Upon Our House. Atlas is in fact a public policy expert and his perspectives were repelled by Deborah Birx and Tony Fauci. They refused to even discuss the mounting data against lockdowns!
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.
It’s worse than that. He’s not a practicing MD but works for one of the bio-tech companies (not Moderna or Pfizer) investing heavily in vaccines and immuno-therapies like monoclonal antibodies. I was heavily pressured to get the Covid vaccine by my wife and in-laws because of his stance and thought I might be getting a divorce because of my refusal but fortunately, did not relent. They no longer see it as so black and white, fortunately.
I was trained in chem/biochem & microbiology. I can spot a dud scientist a mile away because I paid attention in lectures, did not forget and learned how to apply the teachings. The duds are at best 1 trick ponies.
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.
Remember when that hospital doctor went to youtube to beg doctors to stop using ventilators so liberally? I think his rationale was wrong but his observations were correct- the ventilators were causing harm. Kind of sad when a doctor feels he has to take to social media to sound the alarm about a dangerous treatment.
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.
Wow, it’s a little scary to hear an adult speak so glowingly of children making sacrifices for “the common good”… not to mention their own children.
And no, SARS-CoV2 was never dangerous to the vast majority of working age Americans, your anecdotes to the contrary. The data show that. If you want to play dueling anecdotes: None of the working age Americans I know got seriously ill.
But actually - this is supposed to be a blog about scientific evidence, not anecdotes.
I too was scared in March of 2020, when we knew almost nothing about the dangers of this virus. I too advocated shutting things down until we knew more. But by summer, it was obvious to anyone who knows how to objectively analyze data that this virus was not a large risk to the majority of the population. We could have opened up schools, and pretty much everything else, by the beginning of fall 2020.
There are sooo many unsettling things about your lengthy post that I hardly know where to begin. Sacrifices of children "for the common good" is sufficiently creepy that it's taken the wind out of me. But I'll at least ask this question or two: are you aware that the numbers claimed to have been "saved" by vaccines are wholly derived from mathematical models whose manipulated assumptions were not connected to the realities lived? Do you not realize that the "pandemic" was primarily - if not wholly - driven by the absurdities of the PCR testing rollout, with endless asymptomatic testing and inflated CTs with the very primers generated in silco, in absence of any patient derived sample of the virus, anywhere in the world? Do you not know that the early sites of devastation were the result of poor medical decisions - i.e. - paralyzing and venting people who should never have been vented? Before The Panic of 2020, iatrogenic deaths were a leading (no. 3?) cause of death in hospitals. Are you seriously telling us that "a novel" virus suddenly made our hospitals free of the pressures and policies that created that dismal statistic and that we should believe the absurdities of "positive PCR =Death by Covid"...???
Hi. I’ll respond when I have time later, but just real quick. “Sacrifice” by kids means they did remote learning to help prevent unnecessary deaths and serious illness in their communities.
“Greater good” and “common good” means they are part of a community that is not solely serving the individual.
Looks like I walked into a kind of hornets nest here, sorry! I was just trying to have some dialogue. If you reread what I wrote and disagree that’s ok. But I’m coming from a sincere viewpoint as a family doc who has seen too much suffering these past three years. I’m in the trenches. Are you?
"In the trenches" can apply to many battlefield positions in this particular, many fronted war. Yes! Is my resounding answer. As a parent of an adolescent who has lost untold value in the absence of regular social contact and who has learned vanishingly little in Zoom school and from behind wobbly plexiglas shields ; as the daughter of senior citizens whose 60 year marriage was threatened by one partner's panic and (suddenly) blind adherence to authority figures' words ; as the owner of a small business that was designed for and thrives with in-person contact within a small community whose very perceptions of grounded IFR reality were contradicted by a distant State authority; as a massage therapist who understands enough about the subtle dynamic of a healthy immune system that I know to be suspicious of any "silver bullet " answers to amorphously described disease process; as an observer and student of history who understands that centralized, top-down authority choosing to manipulate and/or silence its staff - or citizenry - and dictate "reality" is always, always a precursor to big problems. Yes. I'm on the front lines of multifaceted and complex reality. Are you?
Thank you Dr. McCormick for your long posts, and arguments. So far my conclusions are on the Vinay Prasad side, but I value and respect your professional experiences and interpretations.
Are you familiar with the British philosopher, Jacob Stegenga's book, "Medical Nihilism?" His conclusion is about 80% of the time the recommended medical intervention is not a good idea. Think Mercury,
Thalidomide, Elixir sulfanilamide, Bextra, Vioxx, etc. etc.
About 20% of the time medical interventions are very valuable, and I take three daily medications myself. But every time you take a new drug you are going down a path fraught with danger. The only rational way to do it is after loads of testing and preferably years of experience with the drug out in the field. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the mRNA vaccines did not get this.
"The issue of closing schools has to be remembered within the imperatives of that unique, terrifying moment back in March 2020. "
Vinay has been very clear that this was forgiveable, but that by summer, it was clear that Covid was a mild cold for kids, that they had a harder time catching it (most transmission in Iceland was traced from an adult to a kid, and they knew by then that Covid was attaching to ACE2 receptors that kids had fewer of) and that schools could safely reopen.
Second, I'm glad you view your kids as heroes, because a lot of them have PTSD and frankly will suffer longterm just like someone who has been abused or in a war. Not cool.
Third, adults are supposed to protect kids, not use them as shields. What was done was to protect adults at the expense of children, and people are right to be disgusted.
My husband and I, along with many of our friends and community members, are superfans of Dr. Vinay Prasad. (Note: we *were* all liberal and formerly trusted public health.) We have been following Dr. Prasad since March 2020 and are eternally grateful, beyond grateful, grateful doesn't even express the depth of our gratitude, for how he and other UCSF doctors (like Dr. Monica Gandhi and Dr. Jeanne Noble) advocated and lobbied for the overall health/safety of kids by calling for opening schools for in-person instruction in Aug 2020. This was along with advocating for unmasking kids in schools (per Scandinavia and UK which never did this, supported by data), in parallel with "focused protection" of the elderly and the end of overly destructive lockdowns (given an overall community risk/benefit analysis). Dr. Prasad and his UCSF colleagues are nothing less than heroes to us, and many other parents and families in the Bay Area. Everything Dr. Prasad and his UCSF colleagues advocated for in the summer and fall of 2020 was supported by data (plus common sense), and even more data supports their positions now. Each day they are further vindicated as being on the right side of history with more and more data. This country needs you as head of the CDC Dr. Prasad!
I'm glad in listening to Dr. Prasad and his colleagues, looking at data from around the world, and using common sense, I was on the right side of history willing to teach kids IN PERSON in Aug 2020. I saw how desperately these kids needed it. I also encouraged my own college age kids to be with their peers and move on with their lives as normally as possible IN PERSON (in spite of the college zoom class sh-t show that was a complete waste and vaccines/boosters they were required to get that we deeply regret, were unnecessary in their age group, dangerous to young males, and are now no longer mandated!). And as a family we spent time IN PERSON with elderly loved ones to ensure they would continue to thrive. Everything our family and friends did, by paying attention to our physical health, mental health, and overall wellbeing, and that of our young adult kids and their peers, WAS for the common good! Our circle of friends' approach to the pandemic (reasonable) has been vindicated on every level and thank god my family did not have you has a doctor.
I have never posted or commented. But I feel compelled to respond to your comment Ryan, understanding they are informed by your own experiences.
Ryan, while you make it clear you are a doctor "in the trenches", per other posters I was also in the "trenches", as a parent, a teacher, and caregiver to elderly grandparents. And I find your post offensive and dismissive, and frankly sickening. I'm heartbroken to hear anyone speak so dismissively about kids, many who paid dearly for the unnecessary lockdowns, school closures, loss of safety net/sports/activities/passions/typical child development milestones with their mental health, physical health, and future. You clearly were/are not remotely in tune with high school or college age kids and appear to have a sadly narrow point of reference that seems limited to 4th grade and Disney. You write "remote learning" with zero comprehension of the real lack of learning and lifelong learning loss for many high school and college students. There was no *remote* learning! That's an oxymoron and acknowledged national catastrophe which data supports! (Google the national data around the documented learning loss and Stanford report on lifelong earnings loss.) Worse, those (unions, teachers, school boards, politicians, CDC, Fauci, Randi W, petrified parents with the crap scared out of them by doctors like you) who pushed to keep schools closed past Aug 2020 have blood on their hands. As a teacher, in one town in the Bay Area, I know firsthand of THREE high school students who committed suicide directly related to school closures, THREE who were on track to be first in their family to go to college and ended up dropping out of high school, others who lost out on college scholarships due to no activities for a year, others forced to be at home in abusive environments instead of school a safe place, others trying to do zoom school from the back of their parents' cars at their parents' jobs bc their RV homes didn't have WiFi, etc. And I'm confident there were so many other tragedies I wasn't privy to. Not to mention, MANY young adults I knew dropped out of college due to unwillingness to get boosters (smart young adult men), or pay huge tuition for zoom university, or parents out of work. This was one town, a tiny microcosm of what was happening across our country. You saying the following is mind blowingly oblivious and uncompassionate to the reality that many high school and college students experienced: "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. .... sacrifices for the common good."
I'll be sure to tell those families of the high school students in my town who are dead by suicide, and those students whose lives ARE destroyed bc they were FirstGen on track for college and now don't have a high school degree, or are college drop outs back living at home with no college degree or no job, that their sacrifices were for the "common good".
You ever stop to think that maybe it was the ventilators and not the dreaded virus? The protocol (and the lack thereof) was the primary cause of the detrimental outcomes.
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.
We also had the Diamond Princess (February 2020) and the USS Theodore Roosevelt (March 2020), two perfect Rosetta Stones for COVID, largely ignored. So much could have been done (mostly reassurance and focused research) that was not.
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.
I’m a teacher and I begged to go back. Many teacher friends were terrified. All I could tell them was “turn off the tv!” Not that they listened to me. Now we all feel bad because the kids are a mess.
Fauci is an infectious disease and immunology expert, NOT a public policy expert. Please read Scott Atlas's book, A Plague Upon Our House. Atlas is in fact a public policy expert and his perspectives were repelled by Deborah Birx and Tony Fauci. They refused to even discuss the mounting data against lockdowns!
Wow JT. I will quote your example.
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.
Yes, a huge disappointment and very sad lesson where great amounts of $$$ being spent.
Yes, the media response is what took me by surprise. What a useless lot.
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.
People with an MD think they are smart but in many cases they are just people who passed some exams.
It’s worse than that. He’s not a practicing MD but works for one of the bio-tech companies (not Moderna or Pfizer) investing heavily in vaccines and immuno-therapies like monoclonal antibodies. I was heavily pressured to get the Covid vaccine by my wife and in-laws because of his stance and thought I might be getting a divorce because of my refusal but fortunately, did not relent. They no longer see it as so black and white, fortunately.
I was trained in chem/biochem & microbiology. I can spot a dud scientist a mile away because I paid attention in lectures, did not forget and learned how to apply the teachings. The duds are at best 1 trick ponies.
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.
Lol. Feel the same about the beard and long hair. Actually one OR the other is fine;). But love him
just the same😂
Nooooo! I like the beard!
I gotta agree that the beard makes him look like he hasn't slept for a month. Maybe a trim?
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.
Remember when that hospital doctor went to youtube to beg doctors to stop using ventilators so liberally? I think his rationale was wrong but his observations were correct- the ventilators were causing harm. Kind of sad when a doctor feels he has to take to social media to sound the alarm about a dangerous treatment.
And he was probably blasted for going against the current recommendations.
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.
Wow, it’s a little scary to hear an adult speak so glowingly of children making sacrifices for “the common good”… not to mention their own children.
And no, SARS-CoV2 was never dangerous to the vast majority of working age Americans, your anecdotes to the contrary. The data show that. If you want to play dueling anecdotes: None of the working age Americans I know got seriously ill.
But actually - this is supposed to be a blog about scientific evidence, not anecdotes.
I too was scared in March of 2020, when we knew almost nothing about the dangers of this virus. I too advocated shutting things down until we knew more. But by summer, it was obvious to anyone who knows how to objectively analyze data that this virus was not a large risk to the majority of the population. We could have opened up schools, and pretty much everything else, by the beginning of fall 2020.
There are sooo many unsettling things about your lengthy post that I hardly know where to begin. Sacrifices of children "for the common good" is sufficiently creepy that it's taken the wind out of me. But I'll at least ask this question or two: are you aware that the numbers claimed to have been "saved" by vaccines are wholly derived from mathematical models whose manipulated assumptions were not connected to the realities lived? Do you not realize that the "pandemic" was primarily - if not wholly - driven by the absurdities of the PCR testing rollout, with endless asymptomatic testing and inflated CTs with the very primers generated in silco, in absence of any patient derived sample of the virus, anywhere in the world? Do you not know that the early sites of devastation were the result of poor medical decisions - i.e. - paralyzing and venting people who should never have been vented? Before The Panic of 2020, iatrogenic deaths were a leading (no. 3?) cause of death in hospitals. Are you seriously telling us that "a novel" virus suddenly made our hospitals free of the pressures and policies that created that dismal statistic and that we should believe the absurdities of "positive PCR =Death by Covid"...???
Hi. I’ll respond when I have time later, but just real quick. “Sacrifice” by kids means they did remote learning to help prevent unnecessary deaths and serious illness in their communities.
“Greater good” and “common good” means they are part of a community that is not solely serving the individual.
Looks like I walked into a kind of hornets nest here, sorry! I was just trying to have some dialogue. If you reread what I wrote and disagree that’s ok. But I’m coming from a sincere viewpoint as a family doc who has seen too much suffering these past three years. I’m in the trenches. Are you?
"In the trenches" can apply to many battlefield positions in this particular, many fronted war. Yes! Is my resounding answer. As a parent of an adolescent who has lost untold value in the absence of regular social contact and who has learned vanishingly little in Zoom school and from behind wobbly plexiglas shields ; as the daughter of senior citizens whose 60 year marriage was threatened by one partner's panic and (suddenly) blind adherence to authority figures' words ; as the owner of a small business that was designed for and thrives with in-person contact within a small community whose very perceptions of grounded IFR reality were contradicted by a distant State authority; as a massage therapist who understands enough about the subtle dynamic of a healthy immune system that I know to be suspicious of any "silver bullet " answers to amorphously described disease process; as an observer and student of history who understands that centralized, top-down authority choosing to manipulate and/or silence its staff - or citizenry - and dictate "reality" is always, always a precursor to big problems. Yes. I'm on the front lines of multifaceted and complex reality. Are you?
Thank you Dr. McCormick for your long posts, and arguments. So far my conclusions are on the Vinay Prasad side, but I value and respect your professional experiences and interpretations.
Are you familiar with the British philosopher, Jacob Stegenga's book, "Medical Nihilism?" His conclusion is about 80% of the time the recommended medical intervention is not a good idea. Think Mercury,
Thalidomide, Elixir sulfanilamide, Bextra, Vioxx, etc. etc.
About 20% of the time medical interventions are very valuable, and I take three daily medications myself. But every time you take a new drug you are going down a path fraught with danger. The only rational way to do it is after loads of testing and preferably years of experience with the drug out in the field. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the mRNA vaccines did not get this.
"The issue of closing schools has to be remembered within the imperatives of that unique, terrifying moment back in March 2020. "
Vinay has been very clear that this was forgiveable, but that by summer, it was clear that Covid was a mild cold for kids, that they had a harder time catching it (most transmission in Iceland was traced from an adult to a kid, and they knew by then that Covid was attaching to ACE2 receptors that kids had fewer of) and that schools could safely reopen.
Second, I'm glad you view your kids as heroes, because a lot of them have PTSD and frankly will suffer longterm just like someone who has been abused or in a war. Not cool.
Third, adults are supposed to protect kids, not use them as shields. What was done was to protect adults at the expense of children, and people are right to be disgusted.
My husband and I, along with many of our friends and community members, are superfans of Dr. Vinay Prasad. (Note: we *were* all liberal and formerly trusted public health.) We have been following Dr. Prasad since March 2020 and are eternally grateful, beyond grateful, grateful doesn't even express the depth of our gratitude, for how he and other UCSF doctors (like Dr. Monica Gandhi and Dr. Jeanne Noble) advocated and lobbied for the overall health/safety of kids by calling for opening schools for in-person instruction in Aug 2020. This was along with advocating for unmasking kids in schools (per Scandinavia and UK which never did this, supported by data), in parallel with "focused protection" of the elderly and the end of overly destructive lockdowns (given an overall community risk/benefit analysis). Dr. Prasad and his UCSF colleagues are nothing less than heroes to us, and many other parents and families in the Bay Area. Everything Dr. Prasad and his UCSF colleagues advocated for in the summer and fall of 2020 was supported by data (plus common sense), and even more data supports their positions now. Each day they are further vindicated as being on the right side of history with more and more data. This country needs you as head of the CDC Dr. Prasad!
I'm glad in listening to Dr. Prasad and his colleagues, looking at data from around the world, and using common sense, I was on the right side of history willing to teach kids IN PERSON in Aug 2020. I saw how desperately these kids needed it. I also encouraged my own college age kids to be with their peers and move on with their lives as normally as possible IN PERSON (in spite of the college zoom class sh-t show that was a complete waste and vaccines/boosters they were required to get that we deeply regret, were unnecessary in their age group, dangerous to young males, and are now no longer mandated!). And as a family we spent time IN PERSON with elderly loved ones to ensure they would continue to thrive. Everything our family and friends did, by paying attention to our physical health, mental health, and overall wellbeing, and that of our young adult kids and their peers, WAS for the common good! Our circle of friends' approach to the pandemic (reasonable) has been vindicated on every level and thank god my family did not have you has a doctor.
I have never posted or commented. But I feel compelled to respond to your comment Ryan, understanding they are informed by your own experiences.
Ryan, while you make it clear you are a doctor "in the trenches", per other posters I was also in the "trenches", as a parent, a teacher, and caregiver to elderly grandparents. And I find your post offensive and dismissive, and frankly sickening. I'm heartbroken to hear anyone speak so dismissively about kids, many who paid dearly for the unnecessary lockdowns, school closures, loss of safety net/sports/activities/passions/typical child development milestones with their mental health, physical health, and future. You clearly were/are not remotely in tune with high school or college age kids and appear to have a sadly narrow point of reference that seems limited to 4th grade and Disney. You write "remote learning" with zero comprehension of the real lack of learning and lifelong learning loss for many high school and college students. There was no *remote* learning! That's an oxymoron and acknowledged national catastrophe which data supports! (Google the national data around the documented learning loss and Stanford report on lifelong earnings loss.) Worse, those (unions, teachers, school boards, politicians, CDC, Fauci, Randi W, petrified parents with the crap scared out of them by doctors like you) who pushed to keep schools closed past Aug 2020 have blood on their hands. As a teacher, in one town in the Bay Area, I know firsthand of THREE high school students who committed suicide directly related to school closures, THREE who were on track to be first in their family to go to college and ended up dropping out of high school, others who lost out on college scholarships due to no activities for a year, others forced to be at home in abusive environments instead of school a safe place, others trying to do zoom school from the back of their parents' cars at their parents' jobs bc their RV homes didn't have WiFi, etc. And I'm confident there were so many other tragedies I wasn't privy to. Not to mention, MANY young adults I knew dropped out of college due to unwillingness to get boosters (smart young adult men), or pay huge tuition for zoom university, or parents out of work. This was one town, a tiny microcosm of what was happening across our country. You saying the following is mind blowingly oblivious and uncompassionate to the reality that many high school and college students experienced: "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. .... sacrifices for the common good."
I'll be sure to tell those families of the high school students in my town who are dead by suicide, and those students whose lives ARE destroyed bc they were FirstGen on track for college and now don't have a high school degree, or are college drop outs back living at home with no college degree or no job, that their sacrifices were for the "common good".
You ever stop to think that maybe it was the ventilators and not the dreaded virus? The protocol (and the lack thereof) was the primary cause of the detrimental outcomes.
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.
We also had the Diamond Princess (February 2020) and the USS Theodore Roosevelt (March 2020), two perfect Rosetta Stones for COVID, largely ignored. So much could have been done (mostly reassurance and focused research) that was not.
Absolutely. I remember running numbers on the Diamond Princess and wondering how a 2% death rate for the entire population made sense.
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.