Dr. Monica Gandhi and other COVID contrarians continue to be wrong
Here’s something that you should absolutely never hear an infectious disease doctor say:
“my hope is this variant causes so much immunity that it will quell the pandemic.”
I’m referencing the quote by Dr. Monica Gandhi from this article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-03/omicron-s-mild-infections-signal-a-new-phase-of-lower-severity
To “hope this variant causes so much immunity that it will quell the pandemic” is to hope that enough people get infected and also believe that infection-derived immunity from this variant will be durable and effective against all current and future variants to lead to “herd immunity” against such an infectious disease — which has never happened in history. That’s a lot of dangerous logical leaps
To then hope, based on those very much flawed assumptions, that everyone who does not have prior immunity from an infection or vaccination becomes infected in order to develop immunity, believing that such will effectively end the pandemic, is dangerous and irresponsible, especially for an infectious disease physician. Even if literally every person who did not have some level of prior immunity was infected, not everyone will develop effective immunity and not everyone will develop immunity simultaneously across the globe, so the virus will continue to be transmitted and every transmission of the virus is another opportunity for a new mutation and the development of further variants. So even if literally every person was eventually infected with Omicron, the pandemic would very likely not “end.”
A reminder, pandemic means: “an outbreak of a disease that occurs over a wide geographic area (such as multiple countries or continents) and typically affects a significant proportion of the population.”
An infectious disease doctor should never HOPE that so many people get infected with a virus or develop a disease that there may be a chance of sufficient immunity to end the pandemic portion of this crisis — so that we can reach endemicity.
Endemic means whatever we accept.
If the focus of your career has been working with patients with immunodeficiency in the form of HIV/AIDS, then one might think that you’d be capable of understanding that such a statement is putting their lives — and the lives of other folks who are immune compromised — at risk.
That, of course, says nothing about the not yet vaccinated populations, which includes children under 5 (I acknowledge that this is also something to which I am particularly sensitive as a parent to two children under 5, including one just a month old). The suggestion that COVID or the Omicron variant are not impacting children or are not severe in kids flies in the face of the data. Pediatric hospitalizations have gone way up all across the country. In San Francisco alone, 4% of the population is under age 5 and cannot be vaccinated yet, 50% of the population between age 5–12 is not yet fully vaccinated, and 14% of the population over 75 is not vaccinated. This is only up to 2 doses, as the city does not include 3rd doses in their statistics.
Being willing to accept just letting the virus rip through these populations without at least advocating appropriate precautions and preventative measures is irresponsible and not how public health or science communications are done well. This kind of statement approaches Great Barrington Declaration levels of absurdity in terms of public health messaging, and just about as far from what I would deem worthy of consideration as public health expertise as I could imagine.
This is ableist garbage.
While I understand the urge to want to get back to “normal,” we should accept that the new normal with COVID will not be the same as normalcy prior to COVID. We have accept that the world has changed and will remain changed, not learn to accept mass suffering and death. Not that there can or should be further lock downs, but that the world has fundamentally changed because we have learned a tremendous amount and will continue to learn more over the next few years and even decades — about this virus, public health, science communications, etc.
So called “public health experts” who are trying to minimize COVID, push us through a pandemic on “hopium” while that very pandemic has killed over 800k and left as many as 150k children orphaned, and now pushing us to accept overwhelmed hospitals and further illness and death — particularly more likely among vulnerable communities, including the HIV/AIDS community — as a sacrifice in hoping for a better tomorrow in the face of significant potential evidence to the contrary is unacceptable and should not be given a platform to continue bad science communications to the public.
