A Rebuttal – Leadership Vacuum
The New England Journal of Medicine article: “Dying in a Leadership Vacuum”1 was annoying on many levels. It's a biased, one-sided hit job on President Trump without actually naming him. It is mostly devoid of evidence or references and full of opinions, accusations and cheap shots presented as facts.
How is it one-sided? For starters, it praises China for their results in combating the virus with no mention that it is because of China that the world is dealing with COVID-19 in the first place. It is almost conclusive that the virus originated in China.2 Worse, a Chinese doctor, now in exile, Dr. Li-Meng Yan came forward recently to allege that the coronavirus was a lab-manufactured disease that was intentionally released by the Chinese Communist Party.3 She said her former supervisors at the Hong Kong School of Public Health, a reference laboratory for the World Health Organization, silenced her when she sounded the alarm about human-to-human transmission in December last year.4 She left so she could tell her story. She is working on a report detailing her evidence. Sadly, Dr. Yan’s mother has since disappeared, but Dr. Yan is still resolute in exposing China’s lies. That few people would destroy their lives to spread a lie is strong evidence that she is telling the truth. What the NEJM has done is equivalent to heaping praise on a killer for resuscitating some of his victims.
Additionally, China hoarded PPE all the while withholding (lying about) vital information about the virus's release and means of transmission. Chinese authorities held off from telling the WHO that the unknown illness was contagious, ”to buy them time to import more PPE, including face masks and surgical gowns”, a DHS report stated. 5 And being the global supplier, in their hoarding of PPE they were denying the same to the rest of the world. That affected the ability of the U. S. to obtain sufficient PPE. Nevertheless, the NEJM criticized the U.S. for not procuring enough PPE.
The NEJM article was also one-sided and unfair by its excoriation of President Trump without giving him credit for his actions. He shut down travel into the U.S. from China in good time, and his detractors criticized him for it.6 The New York Times wrote that “some public health and policy experts” believed the restrictions would do nearly nothing to help contain the virus. Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, an epidemiologist and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said ”At this point, sharply curtailing air travel to and from China is more of an emotional or political reaction. Joe Biden called Trump’s closure of travel from China “xenophobic”, although he later said he wasn’t referring to the shutdown, after it became obvious that the shutdown was effective. Medical professionals agreed the China travel ban saved lives.
President Trump directed the FDA to fast-track a vaccine. He also expects it will be released only after its safety and effectiveness have been proven. To improve the odds that one will work, the Trump administration has helped finance the development of four COVID-19 vaccines in parallel though its Operation Warp Speed Program.7 He encouraged rapid development and testing of treatments.
Aside from being obviously biased against President Trump, the NEJM took a very narrowly-focused view of an unimaginably-difficult problem. The COVID pandemic presents a multi-faceted one. Certainly there is the medical and scientific facet, but there are also the socio-economic and personal liberty facets. The problem was and still is necessarily complex. From the start, we didn’t know how it is transmitted. We didn’t know the transmission rate. We didn’t know the hospitalization rates over time. We didn’t know what treatments would work. We didn’t know the death rate. We didn’t know the disease’s variability across age groups. We didn’t have a vaccine. We didn’t know the death rate due to elective medical treatment denied by shut-down actions. We didn’t know the economic impact because of shut-downs. We didn’t know the ripple effect on suicides by denial of social contact and jobs lost. We didn’t know the impact of isolation on the mental health of our youth. We didn’t know some states would have minimal infection and others would have many, or the disparity of infections and deaths across countries, suggesting more complexity in the disease than it would appear on the surface. We still don’t know many or most of these variables. These are just the obvious unknowns – in addition, we didn’t know what we didn’t know. Even if we could have had perfect forward-looking vision and lots of preexisting data on the problem, we had no experience with solving the n-unknown, n-variable equations. One can see this is not just a medical problem; it became a multi-faceted political problem, at least for our republican form of government. Who would want a president’s job during this unprecedented year? Who would criticize a sitting president for mishandling such a huge problem? Monday-morning quarterbacking is usually easy, but in the case of the COVID pandemic, even Monday-morning quarterbacking is hard. Who would have wanted the NEJM in charge? They didn’t even offer the possibility that President Trump and his administration have been struggling with such a difficult problem and acknowledging his good intentions. Instead, they took a pompous, accusatory position - criticizing without proposing a plan.
Further, the NEJM took issue with ”late and inconsistent quarantine and isolation measures, often without any effort to enforce them.” But that criticism ignores that we are a country with a strong belief in human rights, the most important of which are guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Thankfully, there are limits on what the government, federal, state, and local, can do relative to restricting travel and behavior. State constitutions also come into play. For example, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s emergency declaration over the pandemic was recently ruled unconstitutional by the Michigan Supreme Court.8 I suspect that at least half of the nation’s governors have similarly encroached on constitutional rights. The NEJM might like to have absolute power, but thankfully they don’t. It is to President Trump’s credit that he is sensitive to our constitutionally-guaranteed rights.
The NEJM unfairly compared the administration’s results to those of China. But Kai Kupferrschmidt and Jon Cohen wrote “How feasible these kinds of stringent measures are in other countries is debatable.9 “China is unique in that it has a political system that can gain public compliance with extreme measures,” Gostin says [Lawrence Gostin, a global health law scholar at Georgetown University]. “But its use of social control and intrusive surveillance are not a good model for other countries.” The country also has an extraordinary ability to do labor-intensive, large-scale projects quickly, says Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development: ‘No one else in the world really can do what China just did.’”
“Nor should they, says lawyer Alexandra Phelan, a China specialist at Georgetown’s Center for Global Health Science and Security. ‘Whether it works is not the only measure of whether something is a good public health control measure,’ Phelan says. ‘There are plenty of things that would work to stop an outbreak that we would consider abhorrent in a just and free society.’” The images we saw of China arresting sick, old women and hauling them off to quarantine haunt us.
And since the NEJM feels free to offer speculation with no evidence, how about this theory. If China released the virus with malice and foresight, they had plenty of time to study the parameters of the virus in advance and develop plans to deal with it. Maybe their low infection rate is because they had already developed a vaccine and administered it to their population. This is not a ridiculous theory for a nation which has no problem imprisoning and executing its population for just political reasons. But it’s near impossible to get true information out of Communist China.
With all that said, we can't deny the data on what Rona has done to our country or deny that we have done less-well than some countries. Much of the blame for COVID’s impact on our country can be placed directly on our Obama-legacy CDC, which was pushing gun control and other liberal causes rather than preparing for the next pandemic.10 We’ll never know how many thousands of lives were lost due to the depleted and not replaced PPE stockpile. We'll never know how many thousands of lives were lost because of their initial recommendation that we not wear masks.11 Dr. Anthony Fauci actually laughed about the mask lie while admitting the lie. We’ll never know how many thousands of lives were lost because of their withholding evidence that 6 foot spacing is not safe indoors or outdoors.12 They now admit the logical and obvious conclusion which is that the virus can be carried in aerosols much farther than 6 feet.
Yes, as President Truman popularized, “The buck stops here.” But I don’t blame President Trump for not fixing the CDC in his first term. For starters, he didn’t know it was broken, and further he has been dealing with the left’s attacks on him for three years over “Russia collusion” and impeachment. Which problem would you focus on – the one you know about or the one you don’t?
The NEJM proudly proclaimed 34 editors signed the article. But that doesn’t impress, other than to point out what has been occurring for years. The medical profession, including the AMA13 and other medical associations and journals, has been infected by the liberal virus, to use a play on words, much in the way the media and primary and secondary education have. According to the NYT, this is the first political publication of the NEJM in its 208 years of existence.14 So aside from its decidedly liberal politics, why specifically did the NEJM decide to publish a lightly-referenced, evidence-devoid, biased hit piece on Donald Trump? And why did they withhold publication until three weeks before the election? There is little in the article that wasn’t known months ago. I think the answer is obvious. The Journal has a right to engage in politics, but doesn’t it detract from and call into question their scientific Bona Fides? Progressives lately have been quick to say “follow the science”. And how much political bias is finding its way into “science”? The NEJM should stick to their medical reports, which they heretofore have done well, and keep their liberal propaganda to themselves.
Update: Since publication of this article earlier today, I have discovered reports that the published work of Dr. Li-Meng Yan has been called into question by numerous virologists. My apologies for not discovering this before publication.
Reader comment - 10/14
The following comment was received from a NextDoor forum member. "Bill", a scientist and engineer, made some important observations about the NEJM article which I had missed. He waived credit for the comments and gave his written permission to append them here.
"So here are some real Facts that no one seems to put into writing. Excluding them is absolute abuse by the scientific community.
1. The US was the third most traveled to country in the world, pre Covid. Over 200,000 people entered the US each and every day. Even now, we could not possibly contact trace this many people or those potentially infected by them. Even more important and because of this fact, the virus seed rate in the US was much higher than most other countries. Further Domestic travel within the US is larger than any other country, meaning that once the virus landed on our shores it spread rapidly across the country. Obviously any small country can contact trace if they are only letting in 100 foreigners/day.
2. 78% of all Americans are overweight. 40% of all Americans are obese. Other than some small countries like Samoa, we are the most obese medium or large size nation in the world. Many countries have nearly half the obesity of the US. Given the above it is clear that the US should be expected to have a much higher death rate than almost every other country. Obviously Covid co-morbidities of heart disease and diabetes are directly related to obesity. So if a medical journal mentions nothing about the relationship between Covid and the high US obesity rate then that publication is excluding very pertinent facts and should no longer even be considered a medical journal. It is similar to saying there is no relationship between any cancers and any chemicals in our environment.
3. If you exclude New York City, our death rates averages go down substantially. Many countries appear to have better death rates but they protected their elderly, something Andrew Cuomo failed to do."
References:
1 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2029812
2 https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-china-trail-leading-back-to-wuhan-labs/
3 https://www.foxnews.com/media/chinese-virologist-government-intentionally-coronavirus
4 https://nypost.com/2020/09/11/chinese-virologist-says-she-has-proof-covid-19-was-made-in-wuhan-lab/
6 https://dailycaller.com/2020/03/20/flashback-how-the-press-covered-trumps-china-travel-ban/
7 https://news.yahoo.com/u-official-says-operation-warp-214212323.htm
8 https://www.dailywire.com/news/michigan-supreme-court-shutdown-violation-of-state-constitution
11 http://opinionatedoldman.blogspot.com/search/label/Abolish%20the%20CDC%21
12 http://opinionatedoldman.blogspot.com/search/label/%E2%80%9CSocial%20Distancing%E2%80%9D%20Kills
13 https://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2011/06/ama-decline-doctors-care.html
14 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/07/health/new-england-journal-trump.html
