Thinking Citizen Blog — So Is It Settled? Was Dr. Fauci Wrong After All? That’s The Message of Recent Headlines In The Boston Globe
Thinking Citizen Blog: Thursday is Health, Health Care, and Global Health Policy Day
Today’s Topic: So is it settled? Was Dr. Fauci wrong after all? That’s the Message of Recent Headlines in the Boston Globe
First a little context, for those new to the blog. Last time (3/6) a post on the primary physician crisis — the shortage, unionization, the flight to concierge medicine as well as to Wall Street, consulting and biotech. Two weeks ago (2/27), the avian flu (causation, accountability and the Trump agenda). Three weeks ago (2/20). excerpts from an op-ed piece in the New York Times comparing Robert F. Kennedy’s vaccine denialism to the AIDS denialism in South Africa that resulted in 330,000 dead. Four weeks ago (2/13) my three best ideas with respect to how to make America healthy again (the Perfect Week and the Perfect Day, one of the most important posts of the last decade, which might be a gross understatement. Five weeks ago (2/6) the story of Dr, Jim O’Connell, founder of the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program. Six weeks ago, the confirmation hearings for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Seven weeks ago, the US withdrawal from the World Health Organization. Eight weeks ago, the changing demographics of cancer in the US.
Now, back to Dr. Fauci. Are you a health care policy expert? Time to step up to the plate. Is the case against Dr. Fauci convincing? Thumbs up or thumbs down? Today, some excerpts from two articles in the Boston Globe — one by David Scharfenberg, the other by Chris Serres suggesting that Fauci’s critics have turned out to be right after all.
Your help is most appreciated. What charts and tables tell the story best? If you could only show one chart to a class of 8th or 12th graders, which one would you pick? If you could show three, which three? If seven, which seven? Any more than seven would, of course, just confuse any normal student.
And how about one sentence with each chart to explain why it is so important? And how about breaking down the seven charts into groups of no more than three and explaining the groupings and how they are linked to tell an elevator speech of no more than seven sentences for all those thinking citizens out there desperately seeking an example of how to be a thinking citizen?
Experts — please, oh please, chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.
“THE LOCKDOWNS WERE NEVER REALLY EFFECTIVE” — NEW RESEARCH SHOWS THEY DID MORE HARM THAN GOOD” — Chris Serres, Globe Staff, 3/10/25
1. “The stifling of public debate about them eroded trust in public health policy and prevented more effective strategies.”
2. “While the scientific community is still divided over how effective lockdowns were, those who publicly criticized the measures during the pandemic have gained the political upper hand.”
3. “Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, who co-authored a manifesto against lockdowns, is Trump’s nominee to lead the National Institutes of Heatlh, the nation’s largest funder of biomedical research with a $48 billion budget. And Trump’s health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has described lockdowns as an attack on the poor and the middle class.”
NB: “We are long overdue for a reckoning on the lockdowns. What’s become increasingly clear is that a lot of what we did was irrational and based on fear, and we didn’t think through the profound costs.” (Stephen Macedo, political scientist, Princeton University)
“THE MEASURES INCREASED POVERTY AND WEALTH DISPARITIES, SPURRED A DRAMATIC RISE IN ADOLESCENT ANXIETY AND DEPRESSION, CONTRIBUTED TO A SURGE IN FATAL DRUG OVERDOSES, AND LED TO DEVASTATING LEARNING LOSSES IN SCHOOL CHILDREN, WHO HAVE YET TO RECOVER”
1. “As of last spring, the average American student remained half a grade behind pre-pandemic levels in both math and reading.” (and those levels were, honestly, pathetically low)
2. “What’s more, months of unrelenting seclusion causes many people to sever social connections, with lasting consequences to mental and physical health.”
3. “Both volunteering at nonprofits and church attendance, two measures of social engagement, declined and have not recovered to pre-pandemic levels.”
NB: “In 2023 the nation’s surgeon general warned of an ‘epidemic of loneliness and isolation” — brought on, in part, by lockdown measures that isolated people.”
“ON AVERAGE, STATES WITH DEMOCRATIC GOVERNORS HAD STAY-AT-HOME ORDERS THAT WERE NEARLY THREE TIMES LONGER THAN THOSE IN RED STATES”
1. “Yet so many so-called blue states — including California, New York, and New Mexico had among the highest COVID-19 death rates, measured as a share of their population.”
2. “And some red states, including Idaho and Utah, had among the lowest.”
3. “Those critical of lockdowns point to sobering data showing that, despite widespread school and business closures, the United States had among the worst mortality rates in the developed world during the pandemic.”
“THE PEOPLE WHO SHOULD HAVE HELD THEM TO ACCOUNT — THE ACADEMICS AND JOURNALISTS
CHARGED WITH SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER — TOO OFTEN FELL DOWN ON THE JOB”
1. “At a critical moment, American science abandoned its most fundamental tenets. It forsook inquiry, it muzzled debate.”
2. “And American democracy did no better. Reasonable skepticism was cast as tinfoil-hat conspiracy mongering. Twitter and Facebook and YouTube were purged of heresy.”
3. “The pandemic was a monumental test of the American system — and the system failed.”
NB: The exceptions were the signers of the Great Barrington Declaration — who were hounded as “deniers” and “wackos.” Their recommendations for “herd immunity” and “focused protection” were dismissed as lunacy. Below the three principal authors: Dr. Martin Kulldorff (Harvard), Dr. Sunetra Gupta (Oxford) and Jay Battacharya (Stanford).
COMPARISONS BETWEEN COVID AND THE SPANISH FLU EPIDEMIC OF 1919 WHICH TOOK 50 MILLION LIVES GLOBALLY AND 675,000 IN THE US. COVID HAD 104 MILLION CASES IN THE US AND 1.1 MILLION DEATHS. GLOBALLY, THE SPANISH FLU HAD 700 MILLION CASES, COVID 768 MILLION
FOOTNOTE — LONG TERM HISTORICAL CONTEXT
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/03/09/opinion/covid-five-year-anniversary-2020-mistakes/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Barrington_Declaration
QUOTE OF THE MONTH
“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
My spin — then periodically review, re-rank, and exchange your list with those you love. I call this the “Orion Exchange” because seven is about as many as any human can digest at a time. Game?
LAST FOUR YEARS OF POSTS ORGANIZED THEMATICALLY
ATTACHMENTS BELOW:
#1 A graphic guide to justice (9 metaphors on one page).
#2 “39 Songs, Prayers, and Poems: the Keys to the Hearts of Seven Billion People” — Adams House Senior Common Room Presentation, (11/17/20)
NB: Palestine Orion (Decision) — let’s exchange Orions, let’s find Rumi’s field (“Beyond all ideas of right and wrong, there is a field. Meet me there” Rumi, 13 century Persian Sufi mystic)
YOUR TURN
Please share the most interesting thing you learned in the last week related to health, health care or health care policy — the ethics, economics, politics, history….
Or the coolest, most important thing you learned in your life related to health are or health care policy that the rest of us may have missed.
Or just some random health-related fact that blew you away.
This is your chance to make someone’s day. Or to cement in your mind something really important you might otherwise forget. Or to think more deeply than you otherwise would about something that matters.
