Update: Per the White House, Biden was not on cold medication... so why did doctors speculate that he was?

Ambition is ok, bullshit is not

In my latest Sensible Medicine post, I noted that professors at Yale and Harvard dismissed Biden’s debate performance with the convenient propaganda that 'he just has a stutter’/ ‘he might be on cold medications.’

Obviously, for everyone who watched the debate, this was ludicrous, and I made the point that you would fail a medical student who was sent in to work up an increasingly forgetful elderly man, and walked out saying “I think it is just a stutter.” Particularly when that stutter is worse in recent years, led the special counsel to say the elderly man is forgetful, and the elderly man’s own employees say he functions best between 10 and 4… aka a classic stutter. Well, now we have an update!

Some doctors & professors claim Biden's debate performance was due to stuttering or cold medication.

In this video, the White House press secretary specifically states Biden was not on cold medication

So why do we have academics trying to dismiss concerns about the President, when they would eagerly pounce and criticize had this been a Republican? Why write an entire op-ed speculating that it might be cold medication, when it is very likely that will be directly answered in the days to come?

I worry that academics are increasingly willing to do anything to show their partisan loyality in exchange for the hope that they will someday receive a presidential appointment. Remember how Ashish Jha would tweet pandering praise in favor of the disastrous Biden covid policy (forcibly masking 2 year olds with cloth masks at Headstart; pushing out Gruber and Krause at FDA to mandate vaccines that can’t halt transmission), See how he was described in this NYTimes article.

The only way to write an oped 2 mins after a decision is if you knew the decision in advance, and that does not mean ‘impartial and independent’.

There is a class of academic doctor who is auditioning for a role in the administration. They are kissing up on purpose. They try to support partisan politicians in the hopes they may get a promotion to a political role.

I don’t mind that doctors are seeking roles in CMS, or FDA or HHS. Doctors have always had ambition, and I support that. However, it crosses a line when a physician asks us to ignore reality, or says things that are medically wrong, in an effort to pursue their own career goals.

Ashish Jha came on TV and falsely emphasized the need for annual covid shots in young people who already had COVID. Rochelle Walensky has repeatedly lied about whether equipoise exists to run randomized trials of kids masking. Harlan Krumholz asked us to consider that Biden might be on cold medication, when he obviously was not. When your career ambition goes so far that you are willing to disregard the basic truth, then I think it is a problem.

As far as I know, these same doctors never once said publicly that the Biden administrations policy to force headstart kids— aged 2 to 4— to wear a cloth mask for hours on ends has no data and should be stopped. That policy didn’t help anyone and was unfairly burdensome to young children and even people who never graduated grade school could see that. Yet, many doctors refused to say the truth.

There is a reason why the public has lost trust in health professionals. Partisan politics is rotting out medicine. This is one example, but another one now appears on Vinay Prasad’s observations and thoughts (link below). What happens when a doctor tells their patients to vote, and also says to vote for Biden. Read more here..

Should doctors encourage patients to vote?