Where Were the Actual Doctors?

Where were the doctors?  Where were the trained physicians these past two idiotic, self-harming years when there were legitimate, serious questions exploding all over the map over how to properly treat and defeat a pandemic?  Where were the trusted professionals to whom the rest of the public could turn for guidance and equanimity?  Some of us warned against panic.  

The Fauci was busy corruptly feathering his nest, garnering slavish media plaudits, and encouraging likely needless deaths by suppressing some therapeutics and threatening actual physicians while encouraging expensive and ineffective non-alternatives.  His soul sister Scarfy Birx was busy pushing panic, snowing a suddenly duped White House, and flouting her own ridiculous admonitions merely for her own holiday comfort.  The mass media from CNN to Fox to the innumerable Interweb yappers all embraced and propagated fear porn, amplifying daily doom trackers and seizing upon death tolls and hospitalization rates that were…

…what, exactly?

Actually, we don’t know.  Even as the herd media and government mouthpieces pushed the nebulous idea that a positive COVID test was a likely death sentence, we never knew the actual mortality rate, and still don’t.  Where were the doctors?  Remember in medical school how we were all taught to list the immediate reason someone dies as “the cause of death”?  Why was that upended for COVID, and more importantly, where was our profession to stop this harmful dishonesty?  Why did we allow this “misinformation” even as social media sources pushed it non-stop? 

It’s lovely to read that “Massachusetts hospitals will start Monday to differentiate between patients they admit primarily for COVID-19 and those admitted to be treated for something else who end up testing positive for COVID-19.”  But why is this just now happening after almost 2 years of phony numbers?  The reporting differences between “because of” and incidentally “with” have “been on Gov. Charlie Baker’s mind for more than a year.”  My, that sort of bravery and leadership is usually reserved for a mewling politician introducing a bill for state-subsidized puppy care.  If it has been on this august leader’s mind for a year, what took him so long to call for a revision?  And where were his medical advisors, the ones who had been trained to used objective numbers on which to base policy? 

Were hospitals paid more by CMS for COVID admissions, which would certainly suggest the possibility of inflating those diagnoses?  Internet memes say yes, CMS, the Kaiser Foundation, and even The Fauci say no.  But then Scarfy Birx said, ““If someone dies with COVID-19, we are counting that as a COVID-19 death.”  Some of us wondered then why these numbers were being cooked. 

Where were the actual physicians to correct a bureaucrat like Birx?  And it’s not clear that payments were not linked to preferred diagnoses.  From the CARES Act: “For discharges occurring during the emergency period described in section 1135(g)(1)(B), in the case of a discharge that has a principal or secondary diagnosis of COVID–19, the Secretary shall increase the weighting factor for each diagnosis-related group (with such a principal or secondary diagnosis) by 15 percent” (my emphasis).  Do any of us believe that hospital corporations wouldn’t leap at this to pad their margins, especially in a time when so many patients with non-COVID problems were avoiding all health care facilities?

It’s easy to buy into the outrageous but how much fuel was added to the conspiracy fire by not using real numbers?  And make no mistake, the nation has NOT been using real numbers.  “State Rep. Jon Santiago, D-Boston, an emergency room doctor at Boston Medical Center (said) … the fact that many patients weren’t primarily admitted FOR COVID but rather for other medical issues should add nuance to the ‘COVID hospitalization’ numbers. This shouldn’t take away from the bed crunch we face, a serious issue already present pre-COVID.” 

Hundreds of thousands of actual COVID deaths notwithstanding, stupid, horribly destructive policies that wrecked the national economy and caused how-many-deaths-we-shall-never-know due to undiagnosed, untreated non-COVID conditions, never mind a wave of depression and addiction illness, were based on the public perception of huge mortality rates that were not true.  Whether this led to extra payola or not, this was dishonest, caused great harm, and further undercuts the flagging credibility of an already very untrustworthy profession.