| | | I worked as a critical care doctor through the pandemic. I saw hundreds of critically ill patients. I saw a mother and daughter die in the same week down the hall from each other. I saw families say goodbye to their loved ones on zoom as we withdrew life support. It was a horrible and traumatic experience for all of us who took care of patients. The worst for me were the anti-vaxers who died after March 2021 because they refused to vaccinate based on crankpot theories. I saved a 35 year old man after a four week battle on life support in August in 2021, turned out that three of his brothers had already died from COVID and he still refused the vaccine. I was first in line for my shot in December 2020 when frontline healthcare workers got priority.
I do not believe that science and medicine are Red or Blue. It's just the data. Early in the pandemic I gave patients hydroxychloroquine out of desperation, and Vit D and Vit C and other things like pepcid based on scant case reports and association studies. But when robust clinical trials showed no benefit I stopped that.
The public health authorities like Fauci and Birx are experts with decades of experience. Their job is to give the politicians the best advice that science can offer based on the available evidence, and to update that advice as data becomes available. That's how rigorous evidence based medicine is practiced, which is what I aspire to.
Taking the science into account it is up to the politicians to decide public policy response. We could have had zero COVID like China if we were a totalitarian state, but instead we are a federal system in which we had 57 different COVID policies that changed as the pandemic progressed. Looking at the data, I agreed with some choices and disagreed with others. When our school district surveyed parents about the 2020-2021 school year I was strongly against remote schooling, and in southern California we could have easily accomodated outdoor schooling or other on site approaches such as mask wearing. My daughter had a useless senior year of high school as they went with entirely remote schooling, which I was especially unhappy about after vaccines became available in early 2021. Everyone has an opinion about how to handle a pandemic, but there should be reliance on expertise which informs public policy that ultimately is under democratic control of elected officials. The Federal government never instituted any mandatory nationwide policies, other than masking for air travel, it was always the states. Lots of people hated masks, and I had to wear them at work for a year after they were otherwise disbanded. But masks did work, the better the mask the better the effect. We had very little COVID transmission to health care workers in hospitals because we were so good about masking and other NPIs.
Imagine if COVID instead of being most deadly for the elderly, was most deadly for infants and small kids. Everyone one with children would have gone full prepper and CDC recommendations for social isolation would have been superfluous. No mom would risk their child having a 3% risk of death from a viral pneumonia that is so easily transmitted.
The antivax nonsense spouted by RFK, who publicly has said there is no vaccine that is proven safe and effective, is dangerous demagogic nonsense. Measles vaccines alone are estimated to have saved over 90 million children worldwide. Before vaccines, if a pregnant woman caught rubella, she had a large chance of major birth defects. Whooping cough would kill children in a particularly gruesome manner, and smallpox has been the single largest killer in human history, and now has been eradicated.
There are plenty of highly qualified Republicans who have the knowledge and expertise to staff our Federal agencies. RFK has none. |
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