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A Worthy Counterpoint by Emergency Room Doctors
One of my sisters is seeing a drastic slowdown in medical laboratory employment in Washington state. This is a predictable side effect of Dr. Fauci’s “public health” fraud, in which he has consistently misrepresented his unconstrained opinion from a mere slice of the whole field of public health as a fully informed recommendation.* This was simply not the case from Day One, with real public health including suicide prevention, substance abuse treatment and prevention, domestic abuse of every flavor, and prevention and early treatment of lethal diseases, including cancer, diabetes, heart diseases, and stroke. All of these are being predictably aggravated as known side effects of Fauci’s flawed prescription for treatment of the Chinese coronavirus.
We will, indeed, face a public health crisis as the country re-opens, as the healthcare system gets slammed by patients with delayed, worsened conditions at the same that everything from the local lab to the largest hospital scrambles to get staff back to work. Hear it from two ER doctors from California [hat tip to John Hinderaker at Power Line]:
President Trump did not hold a press briefing on Saturday or Sunday. I very much hope he was sent these very popular videos as a needed counterpoint to the “public health” bubble in which Dr. Fauci has wrapped him and the nation. President Trump has been the only one in the White House briefings actually acknowledging real public health includes suicides and substance abuse deaths. He needs credentialed experts to stand up to Fauci, forcing the good doctor to acknowledge that which every medical professional already knows on some level.
* I will back up this very provocative claim in a further post, and will refer to it in the comments here.
Published in General
I just finished watching both videos. Over an hour, but chock full of real world data from practicing Doctors, not academicians.
It’s past time to open up and get back to work.
People will not stand it for much longer anyway. Civil disobedience will become more prevalent. As one of the Doctors said, he visited 3 different gun stores, and they are all out of ammo. I wish I had bought more ammo during the good times. I probably have enough to survive, but you can never have enough ammo…
Saw this the other day. It keeps popping up in different locations. That’s a hopeful sign.
Wow. They are straight out saying that there is no difference in outcome. Thats crazy.
This is the difference between us and China.
Our national media is doing its best to erase the difference by faithfully spouting the Chinese Communist Party line.
But, yes, these two doctors are in no fear of being rounded up and beaten into recanting on the orders of Governor Newsom.
Still entirely comprehensible at 1.5 speed playback, the way I consume most spoken word YouTube content.
CDC death stats for 2020 show an increase in total deaths in April vs 2017, 2018, 2019
I haven’t had a chance to watch the video but I’ve gotten a summary of the scientific and societal arguments elsewhere.
I’m in a dilemma here: I couldn’t disagree with their scientific analysis more. Their 0.03% figure is based on the shoddiest math possible and doesn’t comport in the least with other observations. The analysis suffers from an egregious case of sampling bias: they assume that people who come to an urgent care facility are representative of the public at large, when common sense says that healthy people don’t go to a clinic to get tested, sick people do.
And yet: I couldn’t agree more with the message that we’re dramatically overprioritizing prevention of coronavirus over everything else – including the health of the rest of society. It’s a crime that so many states and municipalities are still discouraging hospitals from restarting their normal activities. It’s ridiculous that so many areas are doing so much to discourage their citizens from walking outside to get fresh air, despite the fact that keeping people cooped up is obviously worse to their overall health, their mental health, and of course promotes the spread of any germs (including coronavirus) they may have come into contact with.
This is the problem I see in the US (and most of the rest of the world) at the moment: too many of the people who recognize the need for trade-offs and the importance of a vibrant economy seem to be deluding themselves into thinking Covid-19 is only slightly more harmful than a seasonal flu, if at all. Yet too many of the people who appreciate the level of excess mortality in hard-hit areas like NYC and Detroit are deluding themselves into thinking that we can just put the economy on indefinite pause, then bounce back as if nothing ever happened.
It was irresponsible for state public health officials to devote almost all medical resources to covid-19.
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket isn’t just financial advice.
Serious misallocation of resources.
This is what happens when public health officials are too worried about negative press and less worried about doing what is right and responsible.
These doctors work in Kern County?
Kern County has had 4 deaths related to covid-19.
I think the biggest problem in the world of healthcare has been that they did not want to give patients with other problems the disease too and also spread the disease through others’ contact with those patients. I know that has been the biggest concern in the Massachusetts healthcare system. It took all winter for them to revamp their systems and upgrade their disinfection procedures. I believe this has been an internal problem, not something the government caused.
And it’s shutdown for no good reason other than Governor Newsom deemed it so.
“outcome” can mean so many things.
I’ll be there are calls to revoke their licenses to practice medicine . . .
True, in this country we do not assassinate people we disagree with. We much prefer to assassinate their character so they can spend all their lives understanding their mistake and begin an example to others. So will they be killed? No. Will they be professionally and personally destroyed? Most likely.
Does it seem that the reporters (the people asking the questions) are protective of the lock down point of veiw? They almost seem hostile to the concept the doctors are presenting.
Of course. Reporters arent here to do critical thinking. Crisis is good for business.
This is why none of them did any of the proper questioning leading up to the start of the Iraq war. They all new the war would be good for there bottom line.
You get the feeling that one of these doctors are upset that cafe rio is shutdown? He only brings it up about a half dozen times.
Yes, and damn right to do so!
Really? Is it that good?
What is the basis of your disagreement with the doctors’ analysis? Could you give us an example, please?
I found their argument very persuasive, as it was based upon their own (local) factual findings, and not on some theory or projection.
If you trust ER doctors to make your medical/health policy you will be in a world of hurt…..No offense, but they are jacks of all trades-masters of none & have a very skewed view of what goes on. It is posts like these that make me embarrassed at times to be a conservative-altho if I was a lib I would be embarrassed at all times. IT IS NOT LIKE THE FLU-the morbidity is way higher-the contagion rate is much higher. More died in the last 4 weeks than the last 12 months from the flu. Even if the death rate is a “low” as the flu, the fact that it spreads more widely will mean the absolute number of deaths will be much higher. The hospitalization rate is also significantly higher than the flu. You can debate the wisdom of lockdowns or their duration- but please quit the mind numbly stupid claim that this is no worse than the flu. Perhaps b/c I was alive for the pandemics of 1958 & 1968 (and was sickened by both) I have a better idea of what a bad flu pandemic can do-conservatives are supposed to be mindful of history- read the history of those pandemics-the 1958 pandemic (it was only the flu!) helped spur a sharp recession & killed 1.1 MILLION people. The 1968 pandemic (it was only the flu!) killed 1 Million. During the flu season I almost never see other MDs taking precautions- you can be damn sure we are taking precautions now-many have bought there own PPE because the hospitals don’t have enough. Most of us actually work when we have the flu- not anymore..
I didn’t watch the videos, but is he the one with the Elvis hairdo?
This is a bizarre argument. The academic epidemiologists who are destroying the economy are better ? We can agree that densely populated cities that depend on mass transit and which did not shut down the mass transit, are having a worse time. Kern County is much lower in population density. So is Los Angeles compared to New York City. The mortality rates are also very different. New York City and its suburbs have had 40% of the deaths for the entire country.
South Korea’s CFR is 2.2%. Annual flu CFR is about 0.1%.
I believe you even though I remember those two years very well and don’t remember anything about a flu epidemic going around either of those years. I may have to fire up newspapers.com and see if there are any headlines that would refresh my memory.
I’m sorry, but these guys don’t know what they’re talking about. The fact that they are ER doctors in no way makes them qualified or trained to talk about this stuff, and they get it almost all wrong.
As I understand it, they are claiming that because a large percentage of the patients they test are negative that this can be applied to the whole community. Wrong. I had to listen twice before I could believe they were actually making that mistake. Only a randomized sample of the general population can be used in a prevalence study. The other attempts to determine actual prevalence of COVID-19 so far have failed due to incorrect data analysis.
When the prevalence of COVID-19 is under 5% then even tests with specificity of 99% are just mostly going to produce false positives. They could provide more accurate estimates of prevalence if the true number was higher. At this point all the antibody tests can provide is an upper bound on the true number.
Their analysis of the New York, Spanish, and world data is similarly flawed.
I agree with them that the lockdowns are not necessary. Based on the Imperial College analysis, most of the work of suppressing the virus is being done by quarantines of the sick, case isolation, and social distancing of vulnerable people. The most oppressive parts of the effort are probably having little effect.
It is a horrible mistake for physicians to rely on their own practice data taken in an unsystematic fashion — the patients they’ve happen to have seen. It only leads to what we call errors of reference, or in other words, confirmation bias. As Hippocrates wrote 2500 years ago, “Life is short, and art long, opportunity fleeting, experimentation perilous, and judgment difficult.” It’s only by pooling experience over hundreds of practices in a systematic way that sound conclusions can emerge.
They keep referring to their own years of experience with immunology and infectious disease. Bull crap. They got three months or less of each in medical school. They objectively have no significant expertise in these fields.
They said several times that the initial estimates of disease spread were in error. As I’ve posted before two or three times, this isn’t correct. The Imperial College group published a range of different estimates based on different scenarios concerning which measures were used to suppress the virus. They predicted that if quarantine of the sick, case isolation, social distancing, and school closures were used then the deaths would total 60,000 in the US, and that is turning out to be about right. To repeat that canard to the contrary is ignorant and irresponsible. It’s going to make people think there’s nothing to fear from COVID-19, and there’s still a lot to fear from it, especially if people take these guys seriously.
That’s an hour and a half I’ll never get back.
@mendel, it’s not clear to me whether they were testing only their patients, or if they were testing people who came in only because they wanted to be tested. So the sample may be more random than is apparent at first.
I checked the Nebraska news, since that is where we were living then. The Associated Press’s Top Ten news story for Nebraska in 1957 have the following listed as Number 7: “Flu epidemic sweeps over Nebraska.” Number 2 was, “Rita Kappenman slain in Omaha apartment.” Number 4 was, “Space ship sighting at Kearney called hoax.” And Number 1? It’s the economy, stupid (as James Carville would have said). “Drought gives way to bumper crop production.”
I don’t remember Numbers 2 or 4, either.
How can I send this discussion to non Ricochet folks? I’ve given up trying with other articles, but this is really important.