If all doctors were allowed to experiment and learn from each other the best actions for treating the virus, imagine what a difference that would have made.
When my husband caught it in March of 2021, it struck me how little the doctors knew about treating COVID and how helpless they felt not knowing. They were throwing everything at it but the kitchen sink to see what worked. I did not understand that the virus kept changing on them and they had to keep up.
Thank you Dr. Cifu for sharing this. I felt very impotent during that time. I'm older but still practicing nursing. I'm a hospice nurse. I don't have a fear of dying, so dealing with COVID was a non-issue for me. I wanted to help but didn't know how. My hospital skills are nil to none. I would've been a burden. I desperately wanted to do something. I thought about volunteering in the hospital to tend to the dying. There is my forte. But I didn't know how to go about it. I didn't see or hear announcements calling for nurses to share their specialty so there might be a place to send us. I'm sure, at least I hope I am, not the only one who felt like this. Is there a system I don't know about to call up retired or people who haven't worked in the hospital setting for a long time? I had the talent (as limited as it was) and the desire but no where to put it.
The tone of many comments here seems to blame you (and us physicians in general) for the many mistakes we all made as a society during the pandemic. Of course it’s easy to point out our failings and ask why we didn’t stand up against The Man in medicine or address risk factors for COVID infection, such as obesity. Don’t take that blame and guilt upon yourself. You did the best you could with what you knew at the time. We are all human and all experienced real fear for ourselves and our family/friends because of the massive amount of uncertainty in the last few years. Yes, there was and still is tremendous suffering because of the pandemic. However, the conscientious human knows that suffering puts us on the path to learning and renewal. We are all re-evaluating our priorities and I am hopeful that our society is moving towards enlightenment. You are a good person and I for one welcome your contribution to the betterment of humankind.
I will preface this comment with the statement that I fully support granting forgiveness, however, forgiveness requires an admission of mistakes and a sincere apology. While some individual doctors have shown humility and have admitted their mistakes, I would argue this represents a minority of medical professionals. Just shrugging your shoulders and saying “It was new and mistakes were made” is not nearly sufficient. What you are hearing is the true sense of betrayal felt by many who feel their doctors betrayed the trusted doctor/patient relationship. While we expect authoritarian and often ill advised actions from politicians and bureaucrats most people trust their doctor for measured individualized advice. The ill advised and damaging actions taken during the pandemic would not have been possible if doctors were not reinforcing theses actions publicly and in their advice and recommendations to their individual patients. You were the "experts" in this area and should have or did know better. Doctors must be held to account for their role in irrational and damaging policies and actions, many of which were illogical and contrary to prior knowledge about respiratory viruses. The harms caused will be with us for years and in aggregate will likely far exceed the potential for harm caused by the virus. If there is no accounting for the mistakes and resulting harms how can we avoid repeating these same mistakes?
While the facts and real harms caused by certain interventions necessitated abandoning lock-downs, school closings and masking the medical community has not admitted their failure and still talk of reimposing these interventions with the next pandemic. For example, medical facilities were the last to give up on the ineffective mask mandates (We knew prior to Covid that there was no evidence that masks were effective against respiratory viruses - the recent Cochrane meta study was an update confirming prior findings from before the Covid pandemic). The FDA has approved (still under an EUA) additional formulations of the failed Covid vaccines without additional testing. Formulations that target a strain of the virus that has declined to represent less than 26% of current infections and will be nearly extinct by the time these vaccines are administered in the fall. These likely ineffective and unlicensed but EUA approved vaccines will be administered to patients acting on the recommendation of their doctors. In my personal interactions with my PCP, my children’s pediatricians, my wife’s PCP and specialists and my mother’s PCP and specialists they have universally recommended vaccination. Not a single one of these doctors explained that the vaccines are not licensed but approved under an EUA, that the safety testing was abbreviated and no drug interaction studies have been completed for the vaccines. There was no discussion of the material adverse effects experienced by many that have been vaccinated. How is this informed consent? Is this not a betrayal of a doctors responsibility?
In addition, the CDC added the Covid vaccines to the vaccine schedule knowing full well that many states use this schedule to guide their decision making on mandates for attending public school. While my state has not yet mandated the Covid vaccine for school attendance they are working on legislation that will eliminate religious exemptions, add HPV and Hep A vaccine mandates and allow vaccination of students without parental consent. Can the mandate of the Covid vaccine be far behind? When will the medical community stand up and say "Stop" or at least ask for a pause so we can confirm safety?
You must live in Massachusetts? They are trying to add vaccines, remove exemptions and allow vaccination of your child without your consent and also never telling you! The medical community has failed us. Maybe Cifu did not. I feel like he may be the exception and not the rule. I am fairly done with traditional medicine. I am finding it hard to think of any value offered to me at this midpoint of my life.
You dealt with people’s fears just fine, perhaps you underestimate the contribution you made by some of us knowing a smart brain who could process data and uncertainty along with our quirky fears and preferences and irrationalities made all the difference mental health wise, that counts too.
Here is what can happen when the proper evaluation and testing of a new drug/vaccine is ignored and rushed to market. This is the 3rd study of its kind to show elevated troponin levels after vaccination. 3% of those enrolled in the test had issues. N=777, Avg age 37 and in good health, all hospital workers in Switzerland. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ejhf.2978?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Thanks, Adam. You seem to be concerned only about behaviors related to your niche. I despair that so many doctors during the pandemic restricted their concerns and opinions to their narrow perspective and did nothing to oppose the increasingly unsupported positions of the medical establishment and the politicians. First, you did not mention any opinions on mandating vaccines or firing individuals, including US soldiers, for resisting. Second, you do not point out that our leaders never considered the use of natural immunity in making decisions. Third, you do not really admit how weak the evidence that masks of any kind as used in the real world actually effectively prevents the spread of respiratory viruses. You had nothing to say about the incredible stress and trauma imposed on our nursing colleagues by the pandemic and how physicians could and should speak to this. Lastly, you have nothing to say about the inhumane restriction forbidding family visitors for terminally ill patients during the first year of COVID. This was horrible, unjustifiable, and should never happen again. Physicians should never maintain a narrow focus on their own niches. By doing so, we have deservedly lost much of the respect within the American public and it will be difficult to restore the trust.
You are totally right. I was limiting this to the effect on my personally. Just needed to work that out. What was done well and poorly on a grand scale will be written about (by others) for decades. You can certainly read it as another failure of mine was that I really was focused on the care of my individual patients. I recognize that in this case that might not have been the most admirable. Thanks for your comment. Adam
I can appreciate the difficulty that people in the medical profession had. While I understand that it damaged many people, myself included, I also understand why doctors went through it and how they had to navigate things. I have some sympathy for the position.
I get your comment here. At this point I am tired of seeing the other's side. When is the medical community, as more of a whole, going to come to the table and actually take ownership? It's still ongoing. They are still saying "rare" and blaming climate change or some other off reason with no reasonable validity for the higher than expected all cause mortality. It's ridiculous. I don't need to see their side anymore. I lived it. When is it their turn to do the work?! Ugh.
It's going to happen, but it will take a long time. One of the examples I give is the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Pretty much everyone was on board with it at the beginning. Very few people were against it, but over a 10 year period, it became clear that there were serious problems with support for it.
We're going to see the same thing here. In 2030, pretty much everyone will be against lockdowns and mask mandates, etc. You're already seeing some of this backlash and people reversing their views. Justin Trudeau said that he never forced anyone to take the vaccines. Fauci has said that he "only made recommendations" and that nothing which happened was his fault. It's because what they did is now deeply unpopular that they're distancing themselves from the view they had in 2020-22. Many people will come to that view over time.
Well I guess I will have to wait :(.... I wasn't as awake as I am now so I don't have that perspective in my memory or experience. I will have to trust your experience and I hope what you say comes to fruition. I trust it will. Again, my impatient side leads. And coming from my family background, there are some.old wounds that also get wrapped up in people not taking ownership for their part. The pandemic is a gift that keeps on giving layer after layer.
Yeah, I think it will happen over a much shorter time than the wars. Mainly because the wars didn't cause a widespread problem in the lives of so many people like the lockdowns did. That's part of why in late 2022 early 2023, people were against things that were "popular" in early 2022. Which is much quicker than what happened to Afghanistan and Iraq.
And this affects pregnant women, babies...all the way to those older or dying (like we couldn't be with our loved ones as they were passing). And it is worldwide. So maybe this is our great awakening. It makes sense what you are saying. Thanks for these perspectives. It really helps me feel less desperate and angry which is no good for me or anyone I engage with.
I'm glad to give you a little bit of hope. I totally understand the frustration that you're having and have had. I felt it very much, but I've had some experience dealing with this for years before the lockdowns. It takes a lot of work to get in a good enough space to deal with it.
At the very least you have recognized the problem. Which is beneficial for the process.
I appreciated this post immensely! Having an immunocompromised body d/t crohns made me appreciate your honesty about your own immunocompromised being. Fear was rampant at first in my head, but I was able to be relatively isolated (happily so!) and so I had much less fear as the pandemic wore on. I do remember the first time losing the mask and it felt wonderful. But like so many of us, I caved into fear and masked and was almost obsessive about universal precautions. After discovering y’all’s page here I saw the politicization of science and public health, and distrusted Fauci and Co more and more - and I ultimately got Covid. Thankfully. Because I’m a fan of natural immunity. I’m grateful for you and those like you, who allowed me to question, debate, and make decisions based on anything BUT fear. I’ve learned quite a bit these past few years. The emperor is not wearing clothes and I’m glad you help us see that.
And our blood...and our organs...wait and see what happens when those of us vaxfree are the ones most needed because we don't have a EUA product in us.
"I wish I had never accepted the idea that we would achieve “herd immunity” through vaccination (or a combination of vaccination and infection). That has never been achieved with a coronavirus, why should SARS CoV-2 be any different?"
In fact, an estimated 96% of US pop. has antibodies to Covid, with about 48% hybrid immunity (exposure + vaccine). That's as good as you can get!
Appreciated your sharing of experience Adam. Tough times for our health professionals layered upon a baseline of 50+% "burnout" symptoms pre-pandemic. Look for a MD/nurse shortage coming up in the years ahead.
Totally true about immunity. I was thinking of "sterilizing immunity" where we would not be seeing infection at all, like measles, polio, small pox. That will not happen here.
I appreciate your take on this but I must admit it leaves me with questions--As your colleague Vinay Prasad has posited, masks don't work in situations like these. No data supports that. So why would it be praise-worthy that people made more of them? Ventilators too turned out to be problematic as nearly everyone that was put on one (my own mom included) did not survive that experience. So why should it be praiseworthy that we allowed our government to convince companies to drop what they were doing and make more?
I think of the simple wisdom of “do no harm” and how most doctors threw that wisdom to the wayside, instead advising/pushing/bullying patients into therapies that are known to harm. And so few recommended sunshine, exercise, losing weight, eating healthfully, and…the elephant in the room, maybe waiting to see how, or if, the supposed vaccines actually worked. you are a compassionate and humble doctor—-a rarity, i think, but as you say, your responses to covid 19 did not affect your livelihood, or your professional reputation. i think i trust more those doctors who spoke out, lost much, but continued to advocate for patients even at great loss to themselves.
It is being “addressed”- with a new pill. Now anyone who is overweight gets to pop a pill to lose weight magically. We need to start addressing the cause and not just focus on the treatment.
A brilliant pastor I know counsels that in many dilemmas, one should seek the "via media," the middle way. In interpreting the fast-evolving crisis and counseling your patients and colleagues, you chose the via media with humility and compassion. Would that more of us could manage that.
Jul 28, 2023·edited Jul 28, 2023Liked by Adam Cifu, MD
It is a pleasure to hear from a doctor with the grace to show some humility. This is something that was sorely missing during the past 3 years. Even today in the comments on this site you see MDs essentially saying “Shut-up you ignorant plebe. You have no medical training how can you dare question what you have been told by your betters.” Many of the things we did in the panic at the onset of the pandemic was contrary to common sense and past experience. These included a lack of consideration for natural immunity, universal masking (with cloth masks?), no consideration for the age of patient, pursuit of universal vaccination during a pandemic for a fast evolving respiratory virus, quarantine of the healthy, etc. The medical profession has taken a big hit to its credibility, when we needed our medical professionals to be rational and reasonable they responded with outright panic and irrationality. I would caution doctors not to take their patients polite nature and desire to move on as acquiescence and agreement. One only has to look at the complete collapse of Covid vaccination rates while the overwhelming majority of medical professionals were still advocating vaccination and boosting to see that many patients recognized the folly of the advice they received and made their own decisions. Also, look at the declining rates for all vaccination or polling of the public showing significant decline in trust for the medical community. I feel badly for the doctors who stepped out and tried to advocate for their patients only to be slandered by their peers and threatened by their professional organizations and employers. However, there were far too few doctors and other medical professionals who did so. What went wrong in the medical profession that allowed this situation to occur?
If all doctors were allowed to experiment and learn from each other the best actions for treating the virus, imagine what a difference that would have made.
When my husband caught it in March of 2021, it struck me how little the doctors knew about treating COVID and how helpless they felt not knowing. They were throwing everything at it but the kitchen sink to see what worked. I did not understand that the virus kept changing on them and they had to keep up.
Thank you Dr. Cifu for sharing this. I felt very impotent during that time. I'm older but still practicing nursing. I'm a hospice nurse. I don't have a fear of dying, so dealing with COVID was a non-issue for me. I wanted to help but didn't know how. My hospital skills are nil to none. I would've been a burden. I desperately wanted to do something. I thought about volunteering in the hospital to tend to the dying. There is my forte. But I didn't know how to go about it. I didn't see or hear announcements calling for nurses to share their specialty so there might be a place to send us. I'm sure, at least I hope I am, not the only one who felt like this. Is there a system I don't know about to call up retired or people who haven't worked in the hospital setting for a long time? I had the talent (as limited as it was) and the desire but no where to put it.
The tone of many comments here seems to blame you (and us physicians in general) for the many mistakes we all made as a society during the pandemic. Of course it’s easy to point out our failings and ask why we didn’t stand up against The Man in medicine or address risk factors for COVID infection, such as obesity. Don’t take that blame and guilt upon yourself. You did the best you could with what you knew at the time. We are all human and all experienced real fear for ourselves and our family/friends because of the massive amount of uncertainty in the last few years. Yes, there was and still is tremendous suffering because of the pandemic. However, the conscientious human knows that suffering puts us on the path to learning and renewal. We are all re-evaluating our priorities and I am hopeful that our society is moving towards enlightenment. You are a good person and I for one welcome your contribution to the betterment of humankind.
I will preface this comment with the statement that I fully support granting forgiveness, however, forgiveness requires an admission of mistakes and a sincere apology. While some individual doctors have shown humility and have admitted their mistakes, I would argue this represents a minority of medical professionals. Just shrugging your shoulders and saying “It was new and mistakes were made” is not nearly sufficient. What you are hearing is the true sense of betrayal felt by many who feel their doctors betrayed the trusted doctor/patient relationship. While we expect authoritarian and often ill advised actions from politicians and bureaucrats most people trust their doctor for measured individualized advice. The ill advised and damaging actions taken during the pandemic would not have been possible if doctors were not reinforcing theses actions publicly and in their advice and recommendations to their individual patients. You were the "experts" in this area and should have or did know better. Doctors must be held to account for their role in irrational and damaging policies and actions, many of which were illogical and contrary to prior knowledge about respiratory viruses. The harms caused will be with us for years and in aggregate will likely far exceed the potential for harm caused by the virus. If there is no accounting for the mistakes and resulting harms how can we avoid repeating these same mistakes?
While the facts and real harms caused by certain interventions necessitated abandoning lock-downs, school closings and masking the medical community has not admitted their failure and still talk of reimposing these interventions with the next pandemic. For example, medical facilities were the last to give up on the ineffective mask mandates (We knew prior to Covid that there was no evidence that masks were effective against respiratory viruses - the recent Cochrane meta study was an update confirming prior findings from before the Covid pandemic). The FDA has approved (still under an EUA) additional formulations of the failed Covid vaccines without additional testing. Formulations that target a strain of the virus that has declined to represent less than 26% of current infections and will be nearly extinct by the time these vaccines are administered in the fall. These likely ineffective and unlicensed but EUA approved vaccines will be administered to patients acting on the recommendation of their doctors. In my personal interactions with my PCP, my children’s pediatricians, my wife’s PCP and specialists and my mother’s PCP and specialists they have universally recommended vaccination. Not a single one of these doctors explained that the vaccines are not licensed but approved under an EUA, that the safety testing was abbreviated and no drug interaction studies have been completed for the vaccines. There was no discussion of the material adverse effects experienced by many that have been vaccinated. How is this informed consent? Is this not a betrayal of a doctors responsibility?
In addition, the CDC added the Covid vaccines to the vaccine schedule knowing full well that many states use this schedule to guide their decision making on mandates for attending public school. While my state has not yet mandated the Covid vaccine for school attendance they are working on legislation that will eliminate religious exemptions, add HPV and Hep A vaccine mandates and allow vaccination of students without parental consent. Can the mandate of the Covid vaccine be far behind? When will the medical community stand up and say "Stop" or at least ask for a pause so we can confirm safety?
You must live in Massachusetts? They are trying to add vaccines, remove exemptions and allow vaccination of your child without your consent and also never telling you! The medical community has failed us. Maybe Cifu did not. I feel like he may be the exception and not the rule. I am fairly done with traditional medicine. I am finding it hard to think of any value offered to me at this midpoint of my life.
🙏
You dealt with people’s fears just fine, perhaps you underestimate the contribution you made by some of us knowing a smart brain who could process data and uncertainty along with our quirky fears and preferences and irrationalities made all the difference mental health wise, that counts too.
Here is what can happen when the proper evaluation and testing of a new drug/vaccine is ignored and rushed to market. This is the 3rd study of its kind to show elevated troponin levels after vaccination. 3% of those enrolled in the test had issues. N=777, Avg age 37 and in good health, all hospital workers in Switzerland. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ejhf.2978?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Thanks, Adam. You seem to be concerned only about behaviors related to your niche. I despair that so many doctors during the pandemic restricted their concerns and opinions to their narrow perspective and did nothing to oppose the increasingly unsupported positions of the medical establishment and the politicians. First, you did not mention any opinions on mandating vaccines or firing individuals, including US soldiers, for resisting. Second, you do not point out that our leaders never considered the use of natural immunity in making decisions. Third, you do not really admit how weak the evidence that masks of any kind as used in the real world actually effectively prevents the spread of respiratory viruses. You had nothing to say about the incredible stress and trauma imposed on our nursing colleagues by the pandemic and how physicians could and should speak to this. Lastly, you have nothing to say about the inhumane restriction forbidding family visitors for terminally ill patients during the first year of COVID. This was horrible, unjustifiable, and should never happen again. Physicians should never maintain a narrow focus on their own niches. By doing so, we have deservedly lost much of the respect within the American public and it will be difficult to restore the trust.
You are totally right. I was limiting this to the effect on my personally. Just needed to work that out. What was done well and poorly on a grand scale will be written about (by others) for decades. You can certainly read it as another failure of mine was that I really was focused on the care of my individual patients. I recognize that in this case that might not have been the most admirable. Thanks for your comment. Adam
Focusing on your patients was a god send not a failing.
I can appreciate the difficulty that people in the medical profession had. While I understand that it damaged many people, myself included, I also understand why doctors went through it and how they had to navigate things. I have some sympathy for the position.
I get your comment here. At this point I am tired of seeing the other's side. When is the medical community, as more of a whole, going to come to the table and actually take ownership? It's still ongoing. They are still saying "rare" and blaming climate change or some other off reason with no reasonable validity for the higher than expected all cause mortality. It's ridiculous. I don't need to see their side anymore. I lived it. When is it their turn to do the work?! Ugh.
It's going to happen, but it will take a long time. One of the examples I give is the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Pretty much everyone was on board with it at the beginning. Very few people were against it, but over a 10 year period, it became clear that there were serious problems with support for it.
We're going to see the same thing here. In 2030, pretty much everyone will be against lockdowns and mask mandates, etc. You're already seeing some of this backlash and people reversing their views. Justin Trudeau said that he never forced anyone to take the vaccines. Fauci has said that he "only made recommendations" and that nothing which happened was his fault. It's because what they did is now deeply unpopular that they're distancing themselves from the view they had in 2020-22. Many people will come to that view over time.
Well I guess I will have to wait :(.... I wasn't as awake as I am now so I don't have that perspective in my memory or experience. I will have to trust your experience and I hope what you say comes to fruition. I trust it will. Again, my impatient side leads. And coming from my family background, there are some.old wounds that also get wrapped up in people not taking ownership for their part. The pandemic is a gift that keeps on giving layer after layer.
Yeah, I think it will happen over a much shorter time than the wars. Mainly because the wars didn't cause a widespread problem in the lives of so many people like the lockdowns did. That's part of why in late 2022 early 2023, people were against things that were "popular" in early 2022. Which is much quicker than what happened to Afghanistan and Iraq.
And this affects pregnant women, babies...all the way to those older or dying (like we couldn't be with our loved ones as they were passing). And it is worldwide. So maybe this is our great awakening. It makes sense what you are saying. Thanks for these perspectives. It really helps me feel less desperate and angry which is no good for me or anyone I engage with.
I'm glad to give you a little bit of hope. I totally understand the frustration that you're having and have had. I felt it very much, but I've had some experience dealing with this for years before the lockdowns. It takes a lot of work to get in a good enough space to deal with it.
At the very least you have recognized the problem. Which is beneficial for the process.
Thanks Andrew.
No problem. I just hope that we learn from this experience and give people a reason to not do this to anyone, including doctors, again.
No thoughts on the considerable damage done to many lives by the aggressive measures to control the virus?
Too many thoughts!
Just didn't seem to fit here.
Adam
I appreciated this post immensely! Having an immunocompromised body d/t crohns made me appreciate your honesty about your own immunocompromised being. Fear was rampant at first in my head, but I was able to be relatively isolated (happily so!) and so I had much less fear as the pandemic wore on. I do remember the first time losing the mask and it felt wonderful. But like so many of us, I caved into fear and masked and was almost obsessive about universal precautions. After discovering y’all’s page here I saw the politicization of science and public health, and distrusted Fauci and Co more and more - and I ultimately got Covid. Thankfully. Because I’m a fan of natural immunity. I’m grateful for you and those like you, who allowed me to question, debate, and make decisions based on anything BUT fear. I’ve learned quite a bit these past few years. The emperor is not wearing clothes and I’m glad you help us see that.
.
The Vaccinated
Sold Their Natural Immunity
- For Nothing.
The Unvaccinated Held On To Their Natural Immunity
And It Is Now Worth
More Than Anything.
More Than Anything That Anyone "Owns".
.
And our blood...and our organs...wait and see what happens when those of us vaxfree are the ones most needed because we don't have a EUA product in us.
"I wish I had never accepted the idea that we would achieve “herd immunity” through vaccination (or a combination of vaccination and infection). That has never been achieved with a coronavirus, why should SARS CoV-2 be any different?"
In fact, an estimated 96% of US pop. has antibodies to Covid, with about 48% hybrid immunity (exposure + vaccine). That's as good as you can get!
Appreciated your sharing of experience Adam. Tough times for our health professionals layered upon a baseline of 50+% "burnout" symptoms pre-pandemic. Look for a MD/nurse shortage coming up in the years ahead.
Totally true about immunity. I was thinking of "sterilizing immunity" where we would not be seeing infection at all, like measles, polio, small pox. That will not happen here.
Thanks for the careful read!
Adam
I appreciate your take on this but I must admit it leaves me with questions--As your colleague Vinay Prasad has posited, masks don't work in situations like these. No data supports that. So why would it be praise-worthy that people made more of them? Ventilators too turned out to be problematic as nearly everyone that was put on one (my own mom included) did not survive that experience. So why should it be praiseworthy that we allowed our government to convince companies to drop what they were doing and make more?
I think of the simple wisdom of “do no harm” and how most doctors threw that wisdom to the wayside, instead advising/pushing/bullying patients into therapies that are known to harm. And so few recommended sunshine, exercise, losing weight, eating healthfully, and…the elephant in the room, maybe waiting to see how, or if, the supposed vaccines actually worked. you are a compassionate and humble doctor—-a rarity, i think, but as you say, your responses to covid 19 did not affect your livelihood, or your professional reputation. i think i trust more those doctors who spoke out, lost much, but continued to advocate for patients even at great loss to themselves.
A failure to put an intense focus on obesity and its management was a huge failure of the medical profession during the pandemic.
It is being “addressed”- with a new pill. Now anyone who is overweight gets to pop a pill to lose weight magically. We need to start addressing the cause and not just focus on the treatment.
A brilliant pastor I know counsels that in many dilemmas, one should seek the "via media," the middle way. In interpreting the fast-evolving crisis and counseling your patients and colleagues, you chose the via media with humility and compassion. Would that more of us could manage that.
It is a pleasure to hear from a doctor with the grace to show some humility. This is something that was sorely missing during the past 3 years. Even today in the comments on this site you see MDs essentially saying “Shut-up you ignorant plebe. You have no medical training how can you dare question what you have been told by your betters.” Many of the things we did in the panic at the onset of the pandemic was contrary to common sense and past experience. These included a lack of consideration for natural immunity, universal masking (with cloth masks?), no consideration for the age of patient, pursuit of universal vaccination during a pandemic for a fast evolving respiratory virus, quarantine of the healthy, etc. The medical profession has taken a big hit to its credibility, when we needed our medical professionals to be rational and reasonable they responded with outright panic and irrationality. I would caution doctors not to take their patients polite nature and desire to move on as acquiescence and agreement. One only has to look at the complete collapse of Covid vaccination rates while the overwhelming majority of medical professionals were still advocating vaccination and boosting to see that many patients recognized the folly of the advice they received and made their own decisions. Also, look at the declining rates for all vaccination or polling of the public showing significant decline in trust for the medical community. I feel badly for the doctors who stepped out and tried to advocate for their patients only to be slandered by their peers and threatened by their professional organizations and employers. However, there were far too few doctors and other medical professionals who did so. What went wrong in the medical profession that allowed this situation to occur?
Fear is a mighty powerful convincer of information, regardless of its root in truth (or not).
Great comment. Thanks so much for your thoughtfulness. I only wish I could start to answer that final question.