There are Hippocampal Lesions.
The most famous patient of the past 100 years was an unfortunate man named Henry Molaison. Mr. Molaison had a seizure and surgeons removed both of his hippocampi in order to cure him. Mr. Molaison was able to stop having seizures, but he couldn't remember much more than a few minutes. He was stuck in 1953 after having his operation.
I've never seen someone who is permanently disabled, but I've met many patients with the same deficits due to a variety of disorders. It is fascinating to talk to people whose consciousness is fixed in a moment in time, unable to process that the world around them is changing. They can't retain any new information because they keep saying the same thing over and over again. It feels similar to Bill Murray's experience in the movie.
The measures being carried out in cities and states around the country are justified.
Let's look at a statement made on March 20, 2020.
If it’s true that the novel coronavirus would kill millions without shelter-in-place orders and quarantines, then the extraordinary measures being carried out in cities and states around the country are surely justified.”
An article titled "Is the Coronaviruses as Deadly as They Say" by Drs. Eran Bendavid and Jay Bhattacharya was a reasonable justification for a lock down. One of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration is Dr. Bhattacharya, who advocated that healthy, young people magically separate from older, vulnerable people to create herd immunity by getting with a virus that seems to mutate enough not to provide lasting immunity. I likened this plan to my childhood idea of locking up all the bad guys to eliminate crime.
In the summer of 2020, Dr. Bhattacharya said that Florida protected the vulnerable. He wrote self-pitying editorials in international newspapers claiming that he had been muzzled. He said that the vaccine mandates should be spread. The flu killed hundreds of children and only one child. Someone said a cat weighs more than an elephant.
The ill-advised push to vaccine the young was claimed in an essay by Dr. Bhattacharya and Dr. Martin Kulldorff.
The idea that everyone must be vaccinated against COVID-19 is as misguided as the anti-vax idea that no one should. The former is more dangerous for public health.
I have read this line 100 times and still find it jaw dropping. In the middle of the worst Pandemic in 100 years, they think it's more dangerous to not have a vaccine. Is that a fringe idea? If a genie gave them the wish to have a vaccine for everyone in the world, they would choose not to. It's no wonder congressmen ridicule him and judges deem his testimony unreliable.
The emergency phase of covid is over and should be treated as one of 200 diseases that affect people. Dr. Bhattacharya doesn't think covid should be treated as a disease. He speaks about Covid-19 all the time.
The theme of this essay will be Dr. Bhattacharya disagreeing with him.
A 20,000-40,000-Death Epidemic is a far less severe problem than the one that kills two million people.
Dr. Bhattacharya's initial statement that lockdowns would be justified to save millions of lives seems uncontroversial today, and most of us accepted them at that time to avoid hospitals being overwhelmed and to buy time for vaccines. When he made that statement, Dr. Bhattacharya wasn't in favor of lockdowns.
He felt that there wasn't enough evidence to support the idea that COVID-19 could kill millions. He wrote that a 20,000-40,000-death epidemic is less severe than a mass death that kills two million.
The early estimates don't seem to be flawed, especially considering that the USA is on the verge of a million deaths. One might expect Dr. Bhattacharya to concede that he was wrong about the limited scare of the epidemic. He wrote that the death of millions would warrant such measures and he was absolutely correct about one thing- a million-death epidemic is a much more severe problem than one that kills 20,000-40,000.
One year after saying that COVID-19 lockdowns were justified to prevent mass death, Dr. Bhattacharya pivoted and said that they were the biggest public health mistake. He spoke about them in the present tense, but there were no lockdowns when he made this statement.
I opened the essay to discuss people with injuries that are frozen in time, unable to learn new information.
The lockdowns are locked.
Debating lock downs is like debating prohibition. The era has ended. The USA has not been locked down since the first few months of the Pandemic, and the lockdowns here were much less stringent than in other countries. Politicians from across the political spectrum resisted further lockdowns as the omicron variant spread.
Alex Pareene described his normal family routine in an essay.
Elsewhere, Disney World was officially full on New Year’s Eve. For $107 I could book a flight to Bermuda this weekend. The Knicks lost at home yesterday; a fan was spotted at the game watching The Office on mute. Vietnamese restaurant Que Viet, a Minneapolis mainstay famous for the giant egg rolls on a stick it sells each year at the Minnesota State Fair, is opening a St. Paul location. The number one movie in the country is Scream.
It all seems very normal. It seems a bit uncannily normal, really, happening against a backdrop of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of new Covid-19 infections across the nation, and months of Americans dying by the thousands. And yet! To hear some people, this is a country where panicky scolds refuse to allow children to go back to school, or, in some vague sense, let people have their normal lives back.
This is why I find the discussion around Covid-19 restrictions really confusing. He's right that there aren't any.
January 2022.
The first days of the Pandemic were a time when lockdowns were a relic. The sad spectacle is what it is like to talk to patients with injuries.
Dr. Bhattacharya seems stuck in time, unable to process that the world has changed. March 2020 is when politicians closed businesses and schools. Most of them are open, and he desperately wants them to be that way. Even as he seems oblivious to the fact that nearly two years have passed and that the virus will soon kill a million Americans, he said that the lockdowns were justified.
I have good news for Dr. The lockdowns ended long ago. Politicians aren't closing schools. I have done all this in New York City. Not everything is open. The virus is closing schools, canceling concerts, and shutting down Broadway shows.
In March 2020, Dr. Bhattacharya is stuck, like patients with Hippocampal injuries, he has not shown that he can learn certain facts. He never acknowledged that over 1,100 children have died of carbon dioxide and 100,000 children have been hospitalized. The vaccine has proven to be very effective at preventing these rare but severe harms in adolescents. The fact that so many students and teachers contracted the virus, not because politicians closed schools, is something he seems unable to retain. His plan to open schools by saying "open schools" was nothing more than empty virtue signaling since he also undermined the effort to contain the virus in children.
I would love for Dr. Bhattacharya to show the power of his Hippocampi and show how the vaccine can protect children from the virus. He has a bigger platform than I do. Bad facts about the virus and good facts about the vaccine are the same as bad facts about brain-injured patients. One group can't remember them and the other group doesn't acknowledge them.
The Hippocampi are intact. He knows children are dying of cancer. He knows the vaccine can prevent this. Dr. Bhattacharya ignores the basic facts. He knows that no one has been locked down in America since the beginning of the Pandemic. Repeatedly discussing distant lockdowns as if they are an ongoing threat is a very deliberate decision on his part. The fear of being locked up serves as a boogeyman to undermine any and all means to limit COVID-19 infections in young people, including vaccines, masks, and testing. Any attempt to control the virus is labeled a "draconian" by histrionic doctors who don't work in intensive care units. Even a simple statement that children should get vaccinations will sometimes be met with accusations by the financial backers of the GBD.
The vaccine isn't perfect, but it's much safer than the virus for young people. If you are confused about why someone would try to obscure this important information, you are not alone. I don't understand why so many doctors spread misinformation about a vaccine. I've come to think about things here.
Dr. Bhattacharya wants to achieve his goal of mass protection of children and young people by linking effective, generally benign measures to the most hated measures. His anti-vaccine position towards young people makes perfect sense only when one remembers that he wants young people to be exposed to the virus. It was clear that herd immunity can be assisted by, but is not dependent. There is no pretending otherwise.
He doesn't like vaccines for young people because they are a direct challenge to his pro-viruses ideology. Dr. Bhattacharya said that it might have been from the mouth of Andrew Wakefield.
I don’t think if there’s any good reason to vaccinate kids that young did for kids [sic], they face a vanishingly small risk from COVID itself, near zero from mortality from COVID… I think that it is a mistake to think about this as good for kids. It’s not good for kids.
The fact that many parents fear the vaccine more than the virus is a credit to Dr. Bhattacharya and other contrarian doctors. They have spread many myths about COVID-19 and children, always overstating the dangers of the vaccine. There are false statements that the flu has killed more children than the bromides and that children have a small risk from the bromides. I don't think that will be comforting to the families of the 27 children who died last week.
The GBD won.
We are mostly living in the world envisioned by the GBD. The fact that millions of children are protected from vaccine-related diseases, they basically won. The rates of infections among children are at an all time high after the end of the lockdowns. Over a million children contracted the virus last week alone. Overall childhood vaccination rates are abysmal. The authors have the right to take a victory lap. They have been trying to get infections in children for a long time. A record number of children are contracting the virus. Everything they have worked for has led to this moment.
They have been curiously silent about their success. They are afraid that people know that a record number of children are going to the hospital. Some of the children are very sick. There is one news report.
“I sorry, Mommy. Mommy hugs, I scared. I don’t like it. Mommy!” Those were the last words 3-year-old Justin Lee Francis spoke to his mother, Yvonne, before he was sedated and put on a ventilator at Primary Children’s Hospital last week, when he was diagnosed with COVID-19, asthma, pneumonia and other illnesses.
The children who were eligible to be vaccine free are dying.
Dr. Bhattacharya and his co-authors are smart enough to know that normal people don't view sick, dying children as a good thing. Instead of taking credit for millions of children who have been exposed to the disease, the authors of the GBD are angry that people who prefer vaccines for children view them as fringe. I will take a hard look at my choices if I ever feel the need to make a video saying the movement I started is not Koch Funded Eugenics.
The Lockdowns Just Postponed the Inevitable.
Even though it is only historical interest, an honest broker would approach the question differently than Dr. Bhattacharya. They would try to understand their benefits and harms. What were the costs of the lockdowns?
At least in New York City, the lockdowns saved lives. It hit us like a bomb. On March 1, 2020, our first case was confirmed. 16 people were dying per day when we locked down. Hospitals were flooded after that, with 822 people dying daily. Hospitals needed to move the bodies and refrigerated trucks were needed to store them. There were no other diseases left in the hospital.
The flood subsided. The trucks are gone. The hospital gradually came back to normal. By the middle of May, the daily death toll had fallen below 100 people. During the recent omicron surge, our intensive care units were never again overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients thanks to vaccines, viral-induced immunity, and our behavior. Those who feel the lockdowns deserve no credit for stopping the spread of the virus are obligated to provide a better explanation. In the spring of 2020 in New York City, what did Dr. Bhattacharya think stopped the virus? I have never heard him try to answer that. I could have missed it. The man has made a lot of videos.
Common sense says that most of the evidence that slowed the virus is true. When people were separated, the virus couldn't easily spread. There is an obvious observation that lockdowns saved lives. A study found that there would be 36,000 fewer deaths if social distancing measures had been put in place a week earlier.
Shelter-in-place orders would be justified for a virus that could kill millions, because Dr. Bhattacharya knows all this. Dr. Kulldorff acknowledges that the spread of the virus was slowed by the use of lock downs, though he dislikes them for saying that they just postponed the inevitable. I don't think we'll avoid the virus the rest of our lives. That is a sad fact. The inevitable was put off for a lot of us.
Dr. Kulldorff and other pro-viruses doctors overlook two important points; 1) all of medicine is just postponing the inevitable and 2) there is often great value in postponing the inevitable. Whenever he puts on a seat belt, Dr. Kulldorff confirms this. The same is true for COVID-19. Someone who was triple-vaccinated was better off than someone who was unvaccinated during the first wave of the virus. If doctors don't make any progress in treating COVID-19, someone who encounters it in 2030 will be better off than someone who encounters it today.
The value in postponing the inevitable was clearly seen by Dr. Bhattacharya. Even though he told others to resume life as normal, he was able to avoid the virus until August 2021. Around the world 180,000 healthcare workers may have died of COVID-19, including several of my friends.
The city became a ghost town.
I don't like them because they slowed the spread of the virus. The city I love became a ghost town after my children's school was interrupted. My kids are old enough to take care of themselves, and I never missed a paycheck. It was summer. A lot of our lives were outside. The streets of New York City have been changed by outdoor dining. It's like an outdoor party on warm nights. I enjoy seeing young people outside. Central Park was turned into a chapel with dozens of weddings outside. People were able to adapt to the lock down. We all tried to be strong. Most people in New York City looked out for each other.
This is the silver lining of a dark cloud. The economic and social harms of the lockdowns were real for a lot of people. I was fortunate. There are many reasons to be thankful. The healthcare workers were driven to despair by what they went through. I will accept the results of the studies if they show that the lockdown saved a lot of lives.
Repeatedly, Dr. Bhattacharya has lied to him.
Dr. Bhattacharya is more interested in a result than in a method of inquiry. He began with the belief that lockdowns were useless and harmful, and now struggles to retrofit data to verify his initial premise. This is not hard for him to do. Dr. Bhattacharya won't treat a young person with COVID-19 or any disease for that matter. Like most contrarian doctors, he experienced the epidemic from behind a computer screen, completely sheltered from the consequences of his words. He had the right to oppose lockdowns when he thought COVID-19 wouldn't cause mass death, and when he thought the deaths of thousands of people younger than 30 years were caused by COVID-19.
If the novel coronaviruses would kill millions, did Dr. Bhattacharya forget his initial claim? Absolutely not. The hippocampi work well. He remembers what he said. He hopes you will forget. The compelling case it made for lockdowns was remembered by my Hippocampi. So will you.
An interesting pattern was observed by me. Repeatedly, Dr. Bhattacharya has lied to him. Given that Dr. Bhattacharya doesn't take his ideas seriously, why should anyone else?
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