10 biggest COVID mistakes – Americans deserve an apology from the medical experts The American people, and children in particular, deserve an apology Dr. Marty Makary
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/10-biggest-covid-mistakes-americans-apology-dr-marty-makary
The medical establishment has marched in lockstep on COVID-19, presenting a consensus of expertise as they marginalized physicians who had different opinions. Two years into the pandemic, it’s fair to ask, how did public health officials do?
Surface transmission
Wash your hands like crazy (at least 20 seconds) and pour alcohol-based solutions on your grocery bags to stop COVID transmission, you were told for months. Despite being an expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci immediately applied the influenza surface transmission model to COVID. The logical starting hypothesis should have been that COVID was aerosolized.
There are only three coronaviruses that cause serious illness in humans: SARS, MERS and COVID. SARS and MERS spread by air. Why did Dr. Fauci think COVID was so different? The NIH could have done the definitive experiment in one day to get the answer. It’s OK to be wrong in science, but not for months when the National Institutes of Health could have spent a fraction of its $42 billion budget to instantly establish how COVID spreads.
No hospital visitation
The barbaric policy of banning loved ones from holding the hand of their dying loved one and saying goodbye was a human rights violation that spanned much of the pandemic. All the so-called experts and the medical establishment were complicit, allowing this cruel policy to be instituted while abandoning their duty to respect the dignity of human life. As a physician, I can assure you there are things worse than dying.
Closing schools
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention argued they were using science to close schools, but many private schools and most schools in Florida and other states remained open throughout (with no difference COVID outcomes). The CDC director initially said schools were safe but was swiftly corrected by the White House the following day. It later came out that the teachers’ unions had made edits to the draft school closure policy before it was issued (kids did not have a chance to make edits).
Now studies are revealing the catastrophic harm to a generation of children – significant motor and cognitive declines and a mental health crisis. In Baltimore, many kids never logged on to virtual learning and were never seen in class again.
Ignoring natural immunity
Ironically, when public health officials insisted that those who had natural immunity be fired for not being vaccinated, they fired those least likely to spread the infection in the workplace. Drs. Fauci and Rochelle Walensky never talked about natural immunity and instead created the imprecise construct of the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. In reality, most unvaccinated Americans have antibodies that neutralized the virus, but they are antibodies that the government did not recognize.
Eventually the data came in. Natural immunity was 2.8 times better in preventing hospitalization than vaccinated immunity and having both meant you had the same protection as natural immunity alone.
The singular focus on vaccines meant that little attention was paid to lifesaving therapeutics.
Downplaying therapeutics
The singular focus on vaccines meant that little attention was paid to lifesaving therapeutics. For example, Paxlovid is an antiviral medication that reduced COVID deaths to zero in the clinical trial, yet not enough has been produced. Fluvoxamine, an $10 anti-depressant medication that has been available for years, was found in two reputable studies to reduce COVID death, up to 91% in the latest study (no study suggests it’s not effective). Yet, few doctors are aware of these data because our public health officials have never talked about Fluvoxamine.
Not spacing out vaccine doses
Spacing out vaccine doses makes a vaccine more effective and lowers the side effect profile. It also would have allowed the U.S. to save more lives when we were rationing a scarce vaccine supply. Yet public health officials dismissed pleas to space out the doses as many of us called for.
Ironically, just three weeks ago, after 250 million Americans received the vaccine, the CDC finally changed their guidance to recommend longer intervals between doses. The CDC acknowledged it was to reduce serious adverse effects such as myocarditis. Myocarditis is now recognized to occur in 1 in 1,862 young males after the second vaccine dose.
Cloth masks
The U.S. remains an international outlier by masking toddlers. At this point the only people in America still forced to wear masks are children, waiters, servers and staff. The NIH could have funded researchers to properly study each mask type in the first 10 days of the pandemic, but they failed to pivot funding to do so. Current data suggests that covering the faces of children for two years with a cloth mask had zero benefit and some harm.
Promising no vaccines mandates, then breaking it
This was a stated promise made by President Biden, Fauci and many others – a social contract. They then broke their promise insisting that any unvaccinated workers, regardless of their risk or natural immunity, be fired. They demanded that soldiers be dishonorably discharged and nurses be laid off in the middle of a staffing crisis.
This policy ignited a debate over civil liberties, which ultimately divided the country and hardened many toward the idea of vaccination. At the same time, the Food and Drug Administration has been delinquent in authorizing the Covaxin and Novavax vaccines, which use traditional vaccine technology.
Downplaying a lab leak
A bombshell investigation by “Special Report” host Bret Baier of Fox News revealed that prominent U.S. virologists told Drs. Fauci and Francis Collins of their concern that the virus may have been manipulated and originated in the lab, but then suddenly changed their tune in public comments days after meeting with the NIH officials. The virologists were later awarded nearly $9 million from Fauci’s agency.
Boosters for young people
Two top FDA officials quit in protest because of political pressure to approve boosters in young people. The FDA issued the authorization by not convening their Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee – a highly unusual break from historic precedent. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that the mortality risk of an un-boosted person under age 30 was zero. You can’t lower a risk of zero any further with a booster.
Throughout the pandemic, all COVID decisions were made by a small group of like-minded government doctors who often replaced the scientific method with medical dogma. They had tremendous influence over medical universities, scientific journals and medical societies. In fact, nearly all of these entities received funding from Drs. Fauci and Collins and from Big Pharma. It’s no surprise, then, that with one united voice, the leaders of these organizations joined the groupthink bandwagon as the media parroted whatever they said.
At this point, the everyday Americans who paid the price for the errors of the medical establishment can evaluate their performance. This partial list of catastrophic errors begs for a complete overhaul of our health agencies. The American people, and children in particular, deserve an apology.
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