'Some doctors & professors claim Biden's debate performance due to stuttering or cold meds'

 Like millions of Americans, I watched the presidential debate this week. I discussed it privately with friends, but refrained from public comment. Why? For two reasons.

One, I don't think I have anything particularly unique to say that wasn't said by dozens of others. Two, I think doctors should try to be less overtly partisan. After all, every doctor has to take care of patients who vote for both parties.

But everyone who reads my columns knows that I hate, above all else, hypocrisy and stupidity. I particularly dislike these traits when they used by smart people in a nakedly partisan fashion. So I'm going to highlight two comments about the debate. One by a professor at Harvard who is an expert in causal inference, and the other by a cardiologist at Yale who is the editor of a major journal. Then I am going to show how their partisan bias affected their pandemic views.

Both of these comments are disconnected from reality. And both people would be saying exactly the opposite had they been discussing their political opponent and not their political ally.

First, Miguel Hernan from Harvard, claims that Biden was just stuttering!

So Biden has a stutter that, his own aides tell Axios, is worse outside the hours of 10 to 4 pm. And the stutter wasn’t like this in his 50s and 60, but has gotten a lot worse in his late 70s and into his early 80s. Hmmm amazing.

Imagine if I send in a medical student to examine a confused elderly man who is losing his train of thought repeatedly, and more often than he did a year ago, and they came out and said, “I think it is a stutter.” That student would not get a good grade.

Now see this explanation by Harlan Krumholz at Yale.

Cold medications? Are you serious? Cold medication side effects that repeatedly occur at public events and late night speeches, and have gotten worse in recent years. Side effects that mean he works best from 10-4, but not hours outside this, as reported by Axios.

Obviously, these comments are so delusional that they represent wishful thinking driven partisan bias. Had Trump exhibited anything remotely similar to Mr. Biden, the same commenters would be writing op-eds about the wonders of donanemab, or phoning in levodopa to Walgreens. They would be calling for him to undergo cognitive testing, drop out, and more.

When Trump had COVID, some doctors claimed we should use the 25th amendment to remove him. Trump famously debated while having COVID19 (with the severity of illness seen in 2020— not the cold like virus we have now in 2024), yet that performance was nothing like this weeks.

Intense partisan bias affected these professors’ decision making during COVID19. Miguel Hernan, who believes Biden has a stutter, supported double masking outside, a ludicrous idea.

Harlan said this during the fall of 2020, when most of Western Europe had reopened schools. DeSantis had reopened, and we desperately fought to reopen schools in SF, LA and more liberal enclaves. Studies from Germany had shown that school reopening does not drive community spread.

Partisan bias leads to blind spots that can lead people to support outdoor cloth masking, or oppose school reopening. Millions of kids suffered from the latter bias, and many people looked like fools from the former bias. Partisan bias can get smart people to think Biden was stuttering or that he just took too much tylenol PM. PS, this is another obvious rebuttal

Doctors would be better of reflecting on how many of their views are potentially driven by partisan bias. As with schools, we see how harmful it can be.

https://www.sensible-med.com/p/some-doctors-and-professors-claim

Scott Atlas was correct & his critics were wrong

 During the COVID19 pandemic, Scott Atlas made many controversial statements. Community cloth masking doesn’t slow the spread of COVID19. Kids should be in school. Lockdowns have no evidence of efficacy.

In other words, Atlas was pretty smart. Randomized data would later show conclusively cloth masking doesn’t work. School closure is now regarded as a catastrophic error, and even Anthony Fauci regrets how long they lasted. Lockdowns clearly have no evidence to support them, and a brilliant paper by Chirag Patel shows they never will.

Of course, not all university researchers read or understood the evidence like Atlas, as the NEJM piece correctly notes 98 Stanford faculty (with absolutely no political bias ;) ;) ) disagreed with Atlas, who was hired by Trump.

But, what about the thousands of other Stanford faculty? We have no idea b/c there is no survey of their views.

The case of Scott Atlas then is a great case for why universities should allow Academic Freedom— because sometimes, the sole dissenting voice turns out to be right.

Yet, that’s not the way this is portrayed in the NEJM. These authors, including one author who habitually makes errors reading medical papers, thinks Stanford should have done more to combat Scott Atlas.

According to them Stanford should have issued statements saying that Atlas was wrong.

Really? Why? To look foolish later?

The idea in the commentary is laughable. Who exactly at Stanford will decide when a faculty member is wrong and their ideas threaten public health. Will we poll the full professors or all the instructors too? Will there be an appeals process? Or will the decision be made solely by the Stanford president —— when he isn’t publishing papers with photoshopped western blots— by himself, speaking on behalf of the university? Or should we just ask the university donors?

The authors provide no practical framework for how this will be operationalized.

But I agree with them a little, perhaps it would have been good for Stanford to have issue a statement

We disagree with Dr. Atlas. Cloth masks save lives and school closure is good.

That way we would all see that Stanford is run by people who are incapable of reading data, and works hard to stifle the truth.

Remember Stanford’s dean asked Eran Bendavid to quiet down on COVID19 policy— already in violation of academic freedom. Discussed in my prior post.

Cornell's New Dean, Bob Harrington, Asked Jay Bhattacharya & Eran Bendavid to stop talking to the press about COVID policy, per B's account

VINAY PRASAD

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SEPTEMBER 15, 2023

I was recently reading Jay Bhattacharya’s first person account of his treatment at Stanford— the vicious disputes about lockdown in the Spring of 2020— and this jumped out at me. It concerns Bob Harrington, the chair of Medicine at Stanford, and now Dean at Cornell

Read full story

The truth is Eric Topol and Abraham Verghese were on the wrong side of COVID19 policy. Instead of debating masking or school closure or lockdowns, they would rather not allow their critics to try to persuade the audience. Faculty who don’t understand academic freedom are a much greater threat to public health than a million Scott Atlases, who, if we are honest, was pretty much right.

And, I didn’t just think this in retrospect

Go check out the audio at min 58 when I discuss Scott Atlas with an ID expert in 2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37pUdXk10N4&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.drvinayprasad.com%2F&feature=emb_imp_woyt

https://www.drvinayprasad.com/p/nejm-posts-a-perspective-saying-stanford