RtAVM

@RtAVM Re: "I think safe to say that any choreographed dance number from people dressed in scrubs has made the average person lose trust in the healthcare establishment." 🙄 x.com/AtomsksSanakan… x.com/crabb_vicki/st… x.com/AtomsksSanakan…

🚨PATIENT BEWARE: Mary Talley Bowden, of "MyFreeDoctor" & "Americans for Health Freedom" A profile of America's leading COVID-19 grifter. Share this resource with your Facebook parents, amongst your Instagram friends, etc. 👇READ, SHARE, SUBSCRIBE: panaccindex.info/p/patient-bewa…

@Marcel_Ballin @JClinEpi @KasperKepp Did Ioaniddis declare that he was writing letters to the White House?

@pan_accindex Ioannidis was writing letters to the White House and is besties with Scott atlas

@RtAVM check out the “full list” of authors on this paper. A verifiable who’s who of objectively incorrect people going back to spring 2020. x.com/Marcel_Ballin/…

This is the first time I’ve seen a university faculty member say this as though it were a bad thing. In reality, in academia, having a lot of grants is a very good thing.

@JoanElizShields So he blocked YOU on twitter, and you told everyone he shut down a conversation on pandemic preparedness. So you lied. And.

@RtAVM He blocked me after posting this jab about my friend, rather than discuss what I shared.

Note: I haven’t read the article. The headline caught my attention. J Howard once shut down a conversation re edu & communication strategies to prevent pandemics because of his bs political accusations. He’s spread political bs about my friends WhatGoesAroundComesAround

Many of these parents died because a child was infected in school, and that child will live with the trauma in being forced to play a central role in the death of their loved one. Pro-infection doctors & academics don’t care at all.

@han_francis @MeghnaWBUR @ashishkjha @TracyBethHoeg Why did @MeghnaWBUR exclude doctors who treated Covid patients? Why just laptop class twitter celebrities?

The recent WBUR/NPR article involving @MeghnaWBUR, @ashishkjha , former NIH director Francis Collins, and @TracyBethHoeg was an important conversation to have but contained way too much revisionist history. Everyone made mistakes in planning a COVID response, but the list of guests here are sophisticated enough to present revisionist history as objective truth to a host that is not necessarily as well versed in epidemiology as they are (and thus hurting future chances at a genuinely better pandemic response). I am obviously not a professional epidemiologist (@dr_kkjetelina holds that title) but I try to summarize what mainstream epidemiology has to say about some of the issues with this interview. Here I show my appreciation for points that are helpful for the next pandemic, and pick apart why certain points are revisionist history (and try to prep the end user to politicize public health further): 1. JHA: So if we start back in January of '20 we knew there was a novel virus. We knew it was going to spread. It was, we knew it was going to become global. And there was a very straightforward response. Get testing up and running. Get surveillance going. Yes, the most basic level of tracking a pandemic virus is to test! It was objectively wrong to politicize COVID testing, claim the swabs contain ethylene oxide, and claim the swabs would give you COVID. 2. JHA: So let's talk about what was happening at the time. And again, retrospectively, lots of things are much easier. We had hospitals in New York totally overwhelmed. We had refrigerated trucks outside of Amherst Hospital. There is really absolutely no excuse for social media influencers to claim that hospitals were not overwhelmed. Some hospitals were overwhelmed to the point they were not able to see all the patients and needed to ship them elsewhere npr.org/2021/08/19/102… . To look at not all hospitals being at full capacity all the time, and claiming that "physicians are lying about being overwhelmed", is willfully dishonest behavior looking for engagement. Not all hospitals were packed at the same time. 3. I didn't, political leaders, President Trump, 49 states, but they did it because we were flying blind. We had no idea. And then lifting those orders was much, much harder, because testing never showed up. So some states did it. Other states didn't. Failure to provide adequate testing in all states of the US was a major systems failure that needs to be corrected for the next pandemic - whether the state is Republican or Democrat. 4. CHAKRABARTI: The results include lower childhood vaccination rates, fewer cancer screenings, deteriorating mental health, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Medical facilities everywhere reminded people to continue their medical care and screenings safely during the worst years of COVID ahrq.gov/news/blog/ahrq… . 5. BHATTACHARYA: The attacks on me had to do with the fact that I was criticizing public health at a time when public health thought that it was irresponsible for anyone to criticize them. Dissent for the sake of dissent is not the mark of a thoughtful physician, it's just contrarianism to gain attention. What Bhattacharya fails to disclose here is that he had the attention of the actual 45th president of the United States. In this part of the article, he is advocating for focused protection, which would mean identifying all medically vulnerable people and sheltering them for an unspecified amount of time. What would be nice of the GBD would be to provide a debate on how to practically carry that out - but it never happened. He only really thought of one aspect - providing free Doordash (hoover.org/research/what-…). It doesn't take a politician to realize that planning a lockdown can't only take Doordash into account. If you don't believe me, you can read the actual text here (gbdeclaration.org), and why it was entirely implausible (gidmk.medium.com/focused-protec…). 6. BHATTACHARYA: ...When in fact what needs to happen is an honest evaluation of the failures of public health. This is code for, anything I don't like is wrong. Has Bhattacharya ever called for an honest evaluation of his mistakes? Not in recorded history. sciencebasedmedicine.org/every-time-dr-… 7. CHAKRABARTI: Unsurprisingly, Bhattacharya rejects that characterization. He believes it was Collins who wanted to quash all debate. I repeat, Bhattacharya had the chance to influence the actual 45th president of the United States. Not many epidemiologists can claim that accolade. There are also hundreds of articles, podcasts, and speaking engagements attributed to Bhattacharya where he had the opportunity to share his views and speak with sympathetic moderators. 8. JHA: I get it. We were in a crisis, but I absolutely agree with the idea that we needed to have public debates on these things. That was much more reasoned, much more civil. That was not happening. Not a single mention about all the political think tanks and institutes, sometimes funded by foreign governments (rferl.org/a/russia-china…), who actively worked to confuse the public and create more confusion/ animosity/ political division. Individual small organizations can do little to fight an organization like a foreign security service - civil debates were sorely needed but so was institutional level pushback against organized, well funded disinformation by rich people with a grudge (thank you @WalkerBragman jacobin.com/2021/12/right-… ). 9. HØEG: What we found was consistent with the reports we had been getting out of Europe, starting in the spring of 2020, that COVID was not spreading to the degree that we thought it was going to in schools, and was not increasing community transmission She is contradicting her own article - the host could have challenged her to explain why she is antimask when her own article says that masks helped decrease COVID transmission (and therefore could have helped open schools better) cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/7… . One can't advocate for "safer opening" without the "safer" part. 10 HØEG: Correct. And our impression was, and my impression actually for many months, before we did our study, was that children were actually relatively safe in schools compared to out in the community. Now the deception is by omission of later data: Most COVID transmission actually does involve children (jamanetwork.com/journals/jaman…), but again, even by Hoeg's own data plus a review by @trishgreenhalgh , this could be mitigated by well fitting masks (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38775460/). 11. HØEG: Yeah, I would also add that it's important to point out that Sweden gave us a counterfactual because they actually never closed schools. This one doesn't take an epidemiologist to fact check - the speaker is just flat out lying here (sciencebasedmedicine.org/yes-schools-we…). There were many school closures at the local level. 12. HØEG: So we don't have good evidence that the lockdowns worked for COVID-19. This is basic virology here - people can't get sick if they don't get the viruses. We have counterfactuals - places like Manaus Brazil had very loose COVID rules and limited testing, and therefore had so many mortalities (telegraph.co.uk/global-health/…). What is a point of legitimate debate is how to do lockdowns/ shutdowns/ restrictions better to take into account individual societal needs and local variability. 🟢Overall take home: These kinds of interviews really need to make greater use of content experts to push back on speakers who make verifiably false statements. 🟢 Take home #2: Town halls and local referendums on how to do the next pandemic better, using trusted local messengers, are a fine start in protecting us from the next pandemic.

COMMENTARY: Misleading BMJ Public Health paper on #COVID19 excess mortality needs to be retracted (by Lone Simonsen, Rasmus Kristoffer Pedersen) The paper has already led to much debate and confusion and has been used as fodder for anti-vaccine advocates cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/comme…

NO surprise. Brutal paper. But damage has been done. This zombie will live on...🧟‍♀️! Expression of concern coming for paper some used to link COVID-19 vaccines to deaths retractionwatch.com/2024/06/14/exp… "...gave rise to widespread misreporting and misunderstanding..." by @RetractionWatch @ivanoransky with @ArielKarlinsky @GYamey 🙏

@sdbaral @ElizabethKamel You just disclosed his info to the entire world.

The way folks responded to my kiddo in the subway who has a cough-variant asthma was wild. In the beginning, I would always say "oh, it's asthma". But why should I be disclosing medical info for these people. They can mask up and wear hepa filters around their neck, hips, and in backpacks as much they want.

@sdbaral You team up with child labor advocates. You don’t care about kids in schools. Fraud.

This is a great example of reporters so focused on attacking Trump that the message that schools should stay closed was seen as an evidenced-based decision when it wasn't. All pandemic preparedness plans said the same thing: schools should have been last to close and first to open. But political fights transcended evidence and schools stayed closed for in person learning. I can only hope that politics will play less of a role in future pandemic responses. But who am I kidding as of course politics will trump evidence. And that will harm us all (and our kids).

@pan_accindex Didn’t he just disclose his kids medical info to the entire world?

The Great Barrington Declaration's Stefan Baral has made it clear he doesn't care what damage COVID-19 will do to his asthmatic child's health and development. How horrific.

Hey #medtwitter - here's a handy resource for any patient who starts bringing up Mary Talley Bowden. Hope this is handy! panaccindex.info/p/patient-bewa…

@RtAVM For all of your favorite Facebook commenters: panaccindex.info/p/patient-bewa…

We’re just over halfway through the year and 8 babies in the UK have died of whooping cough, with thousands more sickened. This is preventable. Worldwide, that number is over 100,000. Those without access to vaccines lose their babies to preventable disease in staggering numbers while those privileged enough to not have to see or think about such loss choose harm. amp.theguardian.com/society/articl…

@Sheep_in_fog @ID_Denmark is a fake doctor(!) who lies about real doctors because they are thrilled when covid kills kids and closes schools.

The ultimate COVID-19 antivax conspiracy theory, courtesy of the Brownstone Institute and Jeffrey Tucker sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-ultimate-c… via @sciencebasedmed @gorskon

Yet again, Vinay Prasad of @UCSFHospitals, alongside John Mandrola & Andrew Foy, was objectively wrong. He has never corrected himself, retracted his statements, or apologized for misleading his audience. Unscientific drivel that is indefensible, @TalmadgeKing