Mistakes we made during COVID
Last week’s congressional appearance by Dr. Anthony Fauci highlighted the wrong turns taken in our COVID response. Whether you regard Fauci, as some do, as a paragon of scientific integrity—worthy of his own new chapter in “Profiles in Courage”—or, as others see it, a dissembling criminal—deserving of a jail sentence or worse—the hearings were a teachable moment, reminding us during this carefree summer of the ordeal we lived through a mere few seasons ago.
Depending on your political orientation, you can feast on widely divergent commentaries on Fauci—so polarized is our cultural climate that he’s become a lightning rod, deified or vilified.
This column is not my take on Fauci. I’ll leave that to others.
But, by any objective criteria, we now know mistakes were made. Here are some of them:
Lockdowns
When health authorities are handed the reins of overall health policy, as opposed to civil officials, they inevitably prioritize the most extreme precautionary principle. It’s in their very nature. Their overarching concern is with disease containment, with scant regard for the profound consequences that may have on the economy and overall well-being of the populace.
Schools closed. People lost jobs. Businesses failed. Places of worship were shuttered. People’s mental health deteriorated. Loneliness and isolation took their inevitable toll. Domestic violence soared. Patients avoided potentially life-saving medical procedures and preventive checkups. People stopped exercising as gyms, pools, parks and beaches were closed, and their physical condition—a key determinant of disease resistance—deteriorated.
But liquor stores and pot dispensaries stayed open.
We even used COVID as a pretext to release dangerous criminals from crowded prisons.
Was it worth it? In retrospect, outlier states like Florida and countries like Sweden didn’t turn into “kill zones”; the virus spread inexorably, and while its dissemination was slowed somewhat, virtually everyone came down with COVID, only later.
The once-maligned Great Barrington Declaration, which called for more modest quarantines to selectively shield the frail elderly and most vulnerable, proved to have been a sensible alternative to draconian lockdowns. But it was denounced and vigorously suppressed as heretical.
I was one of nearly 50,000 health professionals who found the declaration sensible and signed it. The current head of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, was one its co-authors.
Masking
Doctors, nurses, dentists, and dental hygienists often wear masks in the OR, in the neonatal unit, or during procedures. So, it seems logical for the public to emulate them to curb the spread of “germs”.
But that’s more about preventing the spread of bacteria to vulnerable patients; viruses are tiny and can penetrate all but the most expertly-fitted N95 masks. I was made well-aware of how ineffective my paper masks were by how routinely my glasses fogged up while I was wearing them—a sure sign that, even if my masks were not porous, submicron-sized aerosolized viral particles were escaping around them. And coming in.
After all, in labs where dangerous viruses are being studied, scientists wear virtual spacesuits! You don’t see doctors treating Ebola virus relying on just paper or cloth masks—and even with the strictest precautions, some still contract it.
So, masking became a kind of ritual, much like necklaces of braided garlic were once thought to ward off the Black Death in the Middle Ages. Eventually, they became a form of virtue-signaling, denoting one’s allegiance to “Science”, as distinguished from heedless skeptics.
Against all reason, people wore masks outside, even while jogging or cycling. I was once yelled at on a forest hiking trail for not wearing one. Folks were required to wear them in order to get into restaurants, where they promptly shed them to eat or drink.
In retrospect, studies of masking showed it conferred scant protection against the virus. Health officials knew this but condoned the practice anyway.
Social distancing
Sidewalks here in New York City where I live still bear the worn vestiges of those decals that told you where to stand on line outside. But “six feet” or “two meters” was a made-up formulation; logically, if everyone stayed far apart during the entire duration of an epidemic, there would be no opportunities for transmission.
But variables like ventilation, and the inevitability that sometimes people have to crowd together (think stores, workplaces, schools, elevators, and buses or subways) and the rationale collapses. Plus, delaying transmission of a usually non-fatal virus like COVID or influenza merely slows the acquisition of herd immunity . . .
Herd immunity
No term received more approbation from health authorities during COVID than “herd immunity”. It suggested a nihilistic abandonment of the populace to their fates; some likened it to once-popular “chickenpox parties” that parents were encouraged to convene to get their kids to acquire natural immunity to chickenpox—generally milder in toddlers than in adulthood.
Early on, alarmists predicted that COVID fatality rates would be as high as 2-5%, predicting that scores of millions would die. But among non-elderly individuals without significant co-morbidities, rates of hospitalization were under 1%—and deaths a tiny fraction of that.
A policy of shielding the vulnerable, and as callous as it may have then sounded, “letting ‘er rip”, might’ve proved far more pragmatic. We all got COVID anyway, and natural antibodies acquired during infection often proved as effective and durable as the vaccine and boosters.
Vaccines as panaceas
Emboldened by our success in vanquishing many diseases with vaccines, it was logical to launch “Operation Warp-speed”. And the pharmaceutical industry, long-hamstrung by onerous regulatory hurdles, was anxious to rise to the occasion with a novel, but relatively untested technology—mRNA.
Let’s stipulate upfront that the vaccine may have helped some at-risk people avoid hospitalization and even death, especially in the early days when COVID was more deadly and before many had acquired natural immunity through multiple exposures to COVID. But . . .
The claims were extravagant. “The only people dying of COVID now are the unvaccinated”. “The vaccine may not prevent you from getting COVID, but it’ll prevent you from transmitting it.” “Even if you’re not worried about getting COVID, you should get the shot so you don’t kill grandma.” “We should make life as inconvenient as possible for the unvaccinated”.
And no question the harms were minimized. “Sore arm and mild temporary malaise”? I saw many patients, even in my limited non-hospital practice, who experienced severe, long-standing problems. I knew people who developed strokes and blood clots within 48 hours of receiving the shot. Anthony Fauci’s diary reveals that even he experienced a pulmonary infarction in the wake of the vaccine.
Suppression of heterodox approaches
Just as we placed undue reliance on vaccines, emboldened by our astounding success in vanquishing AIDS with antiviral cocktails, we sought novel breakthrough drugs. Among them, Remdesivir, which even a World Health Organization study concluded “has little to no effect on reducing mortality or hospital stay durations for severely ill, hospitalized patients”—hence earning it the sardonic sobriquet “Run-death-is-near”.
We mismanaged patients with overly-aggressive intubation; respirators merely accelerated the downward course of severely ill patients.
Then, there’s Paxlovid, which, like many antivirals for respiratory infections, must be used early to be effective, has limited efficacy against newer strains of COVID, has unpleasant side effects like bitter, metallic taste, and is notorious for the “Paxlovid rebound” that President Biden and Anthony Fauci experienced.
Meanwhile, plausible therapies like convalescent serum culled from recovered COVID patients, and hydroxychloroquine—long used to tamp down autoimmune reactions—were suppressed. I remember how difficult it was to obtain hydroxychloroquine for my patients during COVID—prescribing it could even prompt a referral to the state medical board to yank my license.
I’m not yet convinced ivermectin is a panacea for COVID, but its vociferous suppression by the health establishment has only fueled interest in its potential.
Even recommending sensible, scientifically-substantiated natural therapies was considered heretical. After writing an article discussing the potential of vitamins like C and D, minerals like zinc and selenium, and nutraceuticals like quercetin and melatonin to staunch COVID, I was the recipient of a stern “cease and desist” letter from the Federal Trade Commission’s “COVID Quackery Task Force”. Unwilling to back down, I fought the FTC at great personal expense—and ultimately reached a compromise with government lawyers by simply placing a generic disclaimer on the article.
Censorship
Perhaps the worst threat to democracy that came out of COVID was the deliberate suppression of alternative or dissenting narratives about COVID. People could be throttled down or deplatformed on social media—often at the government’s behest.
The iron-grip extended to publishing. In 2020 I had co-authored a detailed proposal for a timely book on natural support for COVID, emphasizing practical steps people could take to enhance their resistance to the virus. Despite a high-powered book agent, mainstream publishers deemed it too controversial. The book never saw the light of day, but I nevertheless uploaded the proposal here.
China origins
What once seemed an outlandish conspiracy theory—that the virus escaped from the Wuhan virology lab—proves to be its most plausible origin story. But government officials conspired with the media to “debunk” the theory.
The facts have enormous national security and global health implications. The public deserves full disclosure. It’s a black mark on China, too, that they’ve refused to cooperate in a comprehensive investigation of a runaway technology that could literally devastate mankind.
BOTTOM LINE: Admittedly, with the benefits of hindsight, it’s time we surmount partisanship and engage in an open and objective postmortem of our COVID response. Setting aside battle lines, we need to acknowledge and learn from our missteps.