Why A Public Health Mob Turned On Dr. Leana Wen

– Sometimes I’m just, I’m just increasingly convinced we’re living in The Matrix guys. Like like the American Public Health Association, biggest representative of public health in the country, thousands of members, has their annual conference, and Dr. Leana Wen, who is a Harvard graduate, emergency physician, Rhodes scholar, immigrant female from Shanghai, like all the cred is there. Correspondent for CNN all these things have been very prominent. Former Baltimore health commissioner, former head of Planned Parenthood.

There’s a cancellation campaign. 629, at this last check, signatures is on a letter that reads like, as David’s Zweig said in the Boston Globe, a parody of woke righteous indignation. They wanna cancel her. She’s speaking on a panel this fall at this big meeting, 12,000 people can attend, on backlash against public health and they wanna de-platform her. Literally de-platform her. It says it in the letter, they wanna cancel her ’cause she’s probably getting paid something to come to this thing and talk, I assume, maybe not, but either way they want are silenced. Why? If you look at the letter, and this is 629 medical students, academics, MPHs, Master of Public Health, a few MDs here and there, all kind of associated with public health, for the most part, they say, “Through her platform on news outlets “and social media, Dr. Wen has promoted unscientific, “unsafe, ableist, fat phobic “and unethical practices during COVID-19.”

Okay. So what were these practices? By the way, I disagree with almost everything Leana wen said in the early pandemic, she wanted to close schools. She wanted to punish people who weren’t vaccinated. She thought they shouldn’t be able to live normal lives, basically, that we should really enforce mandates and so on and so forth. And I disagreed. Those are policy decisions based on looking at the same data and reasonable people can disagree, right? So these were the things that she apparently promoted. So the unsafe idea that kids could go back to school following CDC guidelines which say you don’t necessarily need a mask. You don’t need to quarantine and do these little cohorts. You don’t need the social distance anymore. Why? Because the majority of children are immune to COVID. Meaning they’ve developed immunity from natural infection or vaccination. They now have options to vaccinate, if parents are concerned, if kids are concerned, and masking can be optional. In other words, it’s gotten to the point of the pandemic where individual choice, which is by the way, anathema of public health, like public health seems, these people who’ve written this letter say this is not public health. Public health is never about individual choice. It’s about doing the most good for the most people.

Okay, so let’s go into that. So how did Leana Wen, who was the darling of public health fall from grace and get canceled by her own tribe? She says, so they say she’s ableist and she’s ableist because she says, guess what? After you’ve been vaccinated, you can return to normal life. How is that ableist? Well, heaven forbid if you’re immunocompromised or disabled and you can’t return to normal life, ’cause you’re still at high risk, everyone else returning to normal life apparently screws you according to people who wrote the letter. Is that really true? When you have in your control an N-95 mask, if you wanna wear it, you can avoid big crowds. You can do those things. And what happens when you tell the rest of the population, you can’t do those things to protect this vulnerable population, many of whom have actually said, you know what? We’re not so much about risk aversion. We’re more about trying to live our lives too. So we’re okay with the risk calculation. Not all disabled and immunocompromised people want everyone to stay locked in their houses wearing N-95 masks forever. But the people who wrote this letter apparently believe that they do. So Leana Wen dared to say, oh shucks, maybe there’s trade offs, maybe there’s policy trade offs because what would you like to do? Continue to wear masks until what point? Stop indoor dining, stop large gatherings for how long to protect how many people and what’s the cost of that?

Well, that gets to the other thing they said. She dared to say that learning loss is a threat to children. Meaning go back to school. And later in the letter, they said, you know what? She thinks learning loss is a fate worse than death because a thousand some kids have died of COVID, which is a tragedy, but well, is it a fate worse than death when wealth and education are correlated and wealth and health are correlated, meaning they’re not two? If you continue to be poorly educated, poor, economically deprived, you’re more likely to die especially racial and socioeconomic groups that are underrepresented. So I don’t think she believes that at all. And I think the public health people who wrote this letter need to pull their heads outta their asses. What are they? I mean, now I’m getting all agitated. I shouldn’t, I wanted to be calm during this.

All right, I’ll get back to business. There was just a piece out about how national test scores in nine year olds have declined in reading and math erasing, two decades of progress since 2020 to 2022. I wonder what could explain that? Could it be the stupid ass social policy of shutting schools which was turned out to be a terrible mistake? European countries didn’t do it. It could have been, they could have been open safely. And who did it affect? Well, the worst affected were people who were already struggling and people in lower socioeconomic and racial minorities. So the people who were already the victims of a gap in education got worse and the same woke righteous people who are signing this cancellation, this mob basically, this witch hunt, because they’re butthurt that she violated the tribal agreement that you’re gonna click these ideological boxes and say these things about safety and ableism and eugenics, which by the way, they also accused her of being a eugenicist. It’s insane. And then we wonder, why do Americans increasingly distrust public health? When there are so many good people in public health doing amazingly important work and we’ve set back their cause by decades by listening to the woke, lunatic, mob, the minority within American Public Health Association, who have signed this letter. Read the list of names of who’ve signed this letter. These are people, they’re legitimate like academics and stuff, some of them. And they signed this letter and there are a lot of people in public health who, actually, are outraged by this. They’re like, this is ridiculous. You would cancel. This is what they call open debate. You need different ideas. And she’s actually expressing what mainstream Americans feel about this. So what else did they say? Dr. Wen suggested that infection should be accepted as a new normal? Oh my God. Why would she say that? When infection is often going to be inevitable, given the vaccines don’t prevent infection, they prevent severe disease and death, which is great.

What happened during Omicron? Like 90% of kids have been exposed, at some point by now, to COVID. It is the new normal. It is inevitable. Are they deluding themselves? Are they in complete denial or are they just so politically captured by this ideology that safetyism has to be extended to its absolute maximum? And the truth is this is harmful because there are trade offs. It’s not just this, it’s this. Look at the test scores in kids. Now you could say, well, test scores don’t mean anything. It’s really about outcomes and this and that. Okay. So look at the outcomes.

The other thing they crapped on her for was because she led Planned Parenthood and now abortion is no longer constitutionally, or no longer protected by Supreme court. Somehow she’s to blame for this. And she was fired for her abuse of staff and this and that. And basically the subtext is she wanted to make abortion a medical issue, which it is, and not focus so much on the political issue of abortion. Now you could argue as a tactic that may not have succeeded, right? But how well did the politicians who were advocating for abortion rights and right to choose? How well did they succeed? How effective was that political approach? Not effective! So Leana Wen was actually saying, you know what? There are a lot of people who feel this way and that’s why it’s a medical issue. Let’s treat it as a medical issue. Planned Parenthood does other things than abortion. Let’s talk about all these things. I don’t know that I disagree with that but they attacked her in this letter for that. What else did they say? Oh, it’s great, man. Her repeated statements are antagonistic and diminish the hard work of a APHA members. All right, let’s see what was antagonistic.

She did a Washington post op-ed that said instead of defund the police imagine a broader role for them in public health. No don’t defund the police? That is antagonistic to the work, the tireless work of APHA public health members. Says who? Are you kidding me? Guys, this is a joke. It’s outrageous. It’s outrageous. There are so many wonderful public health workers and people out there, doctors, and MPHs, and administrators who are doing wonderful work. And they don’t believe any of this shit. They don’t believe any of this shit, that the people in the letter are writing. Now here’s the best news. The a APHA was like, oh, let’s see this letter 629 people. Yeah. Can you hear this? Let me turn it up for you. Healthy debate is important. She’s on a panel about backlash to public health. Could it be that there’s backlash to public health because of the way you people writing the letter are behaving? ’cause rational alt-middle, sensible people who combine science, sense, and policy can see things differently. Whereas you’re a woke righteous mob of lunatics. That’s how you come off. You may, probably great people, but you come off this way and you’re totally blind to it. You’re totally blind. The whole letter is citing tweets. Like that’s their citations. These are public health people. You’re gonna cite tweets. I don’t know guys. I just don’t know. I worry that the future, our future is dependent on us seeing through this kind of behavior.

You may disagree with Leana Wen, I actually do on a lot of things, but you can’t disagree that she’s qualified to talk about it. That she’s a member of the org, that she’s done a lot of work in this space and that she’d be, to de-platform her is to silence her speech that’s actually worth hearing. If you disagree, go and talk about it, go and debate her. That’s it. I don’t know, man. I just feel like we are insane. And we’re hived off into these political hive minds. This is a very lefty left thing. The right does crazy shit too. Don’t get me wrong. Right? We’ve talked about that. Snort some ivermectin guys? They all have their badges of religiosity, all of them, but that this infects academia, preferentially, and these are the people we’re supposed to trust with public health and we don’t anymore. And they don’t deserve our trust when they behave like this. So let’s wake up. Subscribe to the channel, share the video, crush that like button. I love you guys. Please, let’s just get some sense here. And we are out, peace.