Political leaders and health officials have often invoked “science” to justify decisions manifestly guided by their personal preferences. That costs them credibility. Restoring public confidence will require acknowledging their role in politicizing the pandemic, yielding to accommodations and sensible alternatives in the areas of greatest controversy, and focusing on the widely supported goal of not overwhelming hospitals, rather than less meaningful metrics such as increases in Covid-19 cases.
Thursday, July 02, 2020
A physician’s view …
… The Coronavirus Credibility Gap - WSJ.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
A decent analysis of the politicization of coronavirus, but one that's ultimately undermined by the author's own ideological biases. He rightly calls out liberal politicians like Garcetti and Murphy for a double standard regarding protests. But he ignores the debacle currently underway in Texas, where the conservative governor is actively interfering with hospitals trying to, in the author's own words, "(be) transparent about bed availability, illness severity of hospitalized patients, and efforts to increase treatment capacity..."
ReplyDeleteHouston is presently in the grip of a hospital crisis much like that which hit NYC in early April. All 1330 ICU beds in the 19 hospitals which constitute the Texas Medical Center are now full, including ICU beds occupied by adults in a children's hospital. The Center has another 370 beds it calls 'sustainable ICU surge capacity', and 500 called 'unsustainable ICU surge capacity'. They expect the sustainable surge capacity to be exceeded within two weeks. Ambulances are idling at the curb, waiting for beds to become available for the patients they carry. Doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, and other staff are working past the point of exhaustion (personal communication with doctors in these hospitals). Sound familiar?
The Medical Center website has been providing daily updates on bed availability, an invaluable public service that the governor tried to shut down last week, trying to hide his incompetence in easing restrictions too early. The Medical Center stood its ground, but in an apparent concession to the governor, removed the from their graphs markers showing the dates on which various restrictions were eased. Too embarrassing for the gov, apparently.
If Dr. Ladapo was genuinely concerned about politicization of the pandemic, he would have included this, or one of many other examples of interference from conservative politicos. His failure to do so reveals him to be just another ideological hack.
The piece also contains a glaring example of illogic. He states: "Many illnesses spread as a result of personal decisions and behavior. The contemporary consensus in the medical community has been to acknowledge - without judgment - that preferences and circumstances of individuals vary. THIS HAS BEEN TRUE EVEN WHEN INDIVIDUAL DECISIONS AFFECT THE HEALTH OF OTHERS [my caps]. This is why public-health experts advocate pre-exposure prophylaxis antiretrovirals for HIV prevention, needle-exchange programs for drug users, and, in the UK, e-cigarettes for smoking cessation."
ReplyDeleteThis makes no sense. The three examples he provides were developed specifically to reduce the risk of harm to others. They are in fact counterexamples to his assertion that modern medical ethics privilege individual freedom over protection of others.