This Washington Post two-fisted pundit makes bad guidance worse

Last update: Tuesday 9/20/22 

Dr. Leana S. Wen reminds the editor of this blog of the overachieving "B" students in his undergraduate and graduate level courses during his twenty years as a university professor. Although they worked hard, usually harder than his "A" students, he gave them B's because they could name all of individual trees in his assignments, but they invariably showed no perception of the shape of the forest. 

In a couple of previous notes on this blog, the editor has suggested that it's useful to distinguish between two kinds of COVID misinformation:

1. The blatant lies propounded by conservative media, e.g., the absurdities of Tucker Carlson
2. The misleading guidance offered by the mainstream liberal/progressive media wherein the data is correct, but the interpretations are unfounded.

Ever since joining the staff of the Washington Post a couple of years ago, Dr. Wen has voiced the CDC's mainstream dogmas in strident tones. The editor of this blog merely skimmed most of her two fisted op eds, but every now and then her determination to make her voice heard above the noisy herd has driven her to take  extreme positions wherein she displays the same lack of awareness of the bigger picture as had the editor's overachieving B students. Consider the following couple of examples.

1. "With masks and distancing, Biden’s speech sent the wrong message about the power of our vaccines", Leana S. Wen, Washington Post, 4/29/21

The editor asks his readers to be patient enough to read the following extensive excerpts from Dr. Wen's impatient op ed:

"With his speech before a joint session of Congress on Wednesday night, President Biden missed his biggest opportunity to reduce vaccine hesitancy. The problem wasn’t the content of his speech — it was the setting. The 200 attendees entered the 1,600-person-capacity House chamber spaced apart and wearing masks. Some appeared to be double-masked ... If I didn’t know better, I would have thought this was six months ago, before Americans had access to safe, highly effective vaccines ... Thanks to the Biden administration’s leadership, every American 16 and older can sign up to receive one of these incredible vaccines."

Dr. Wen has tunnel vision that sees what's directly in front of her with crystal clarity, but like the editor's B students, she seems to lack the capacity to imagine what's directly in front of other people.  

A state's residents cannot hesitate to receive something that's not available. At the time of President Biden's speech, contrary to Dr. Wen's confident assertion, vaccines were not available to most of the millions of Americans 16 and over in the South because most of that region's red state governors had not pushed vaccination programs as vigorously as had the governors of blue states. Florida's Governor DeSantis was a notable exception with regards to his intensive efforts to vaccinate his state's oldest, most vulnerable residents.  

Of course, Dr. Wen might reply that had the president abandoned his masks and other mitigations, his actions might have inspired some GOP governors to redouble their vaccination efforts or inspired their GOP constituents to put pressure on their GOP governors to do so. No, Dr. Wen, President Biden's actions do not inspire GOP governors nor their GOP constituents to do anything.

Now here's a another attention grabbing blowoff:

2. "Biden is right. The pandemic is over.", Leana S. Wen, Washington Post, 9/20/22

Many observers, including the editor of this blog, have assailed the president for his latest gaffe. Indeed, it is a truly baffling gaffe coming from a 79 year old man in September 2022 who spent most of August 2022 in isolation due to repeated infections, rebounds, and/or reinfections. (See the editor's "trolling" blog notes that tracked President Biden's day-to-day withdrawals from public appearances: 

• "President Biden infected and reinfected, but up close and unmasked again ... more photos 8/10/22" and 
  
  
• "Where is President Biden? -- He was out of quarantine/isolation and back on the 2022 campaign trail on 8/30/22" 

Dr. Wen's "contribution" to this discussion stems from her personal definition of a pandemic: 

"A pandemic is something that upends our daily lives and profoundly alters the way that we work, go to school, worship and socialize."

Interesting, creative, but it bears no resemblance to the CDC's definition 

"An outbreak is called an epidemic when there is a sudden increase in cases. As COVID-19 began spreading in Wuhan, China, it became an epidemic. Because the disease then spread across several countries and affected a large number of people, it was classified as a pandemic."

Dr. Wen's definition embodies her tunnel vision of the COVID pandemic as a lethal epidemic. Pandemics involve multiple countries, multiple geographic regions. This broader definition embodies a recognition that variants can arise anywhere in the world and spread to other countries. The original coronavirus variant originated in China; Delta in India; and Omicr in South Africa. The next major variant might come from anywhere, perhaps the USA. Indeed, the global flow of variants explains why the WHO monitors the surges of new variants everywhere in the world

Note also that the CDC's definition makes no reference to the lethality of the disease. Dr. Wen's confident assessments embody a tacit hope that is becoming widespread that the pandemic is over because the Omicron "family" are the final variants, becoming milder and milder all over the world, eventually becoming no more lethal than seasonal flu. If so, then perhaps our vaccines, treatments, and rapid self-tests will enable us to "control" COVID for the foreseeable future. However, COVID has produced disruptive new variants every year since it began in late 2019. So who can be sure that the end of 2022 or the beginning of 2023 won't throw up yet another family of variants that evade our current vaccines and treatments?

Finally, the editor of this blog cannot recall any of Dr. Wen's assertive op ed pieces that addressed the scary 2,000 pound, no the 20 thousand pound, no the 20 million pound gorilla seated quietly at the end of the COVID table. The largest studies that have appeared to date offer little reason to hope that our vaccines, boosters, and treatments offer substantial protection against long COVID. At this time, the only way to substantially decrease the likelihood of incurring long COVID is to live a risk averse lifestyle that gives higher priority to mitigations that avoid infection than to vaccines and treatments.

•  "Long COVID risk falls only slightly after vaccination, huge study shows", Sara Reardon, Nature, 5/25/22
  
• "At least 17 million people in the WHO European Region experienced long COVID in the first two years of the pandemic; millions may have to live with it for years to come", WHO, 9/13/22
• "Long COVID Experts and Advocates Say the Government Is Ignoring 'the Greatest Mass-Disabling Event in Human History'", Jamie Ducharme, Time, 9/19/22

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Links to related notes on this blog:  

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