A Legend At A Brooklyn Hospital Dies Of Covid-19: ‘He Ran Into The Fire’
Being a frontline healthcare worker was just one of 10,000 ways in which people made crucial pandemic contributions. It was not a requirement to comment on COVID or a guarantee that the person had anything valuable to say. However, working on a COVID unit provided an essential perspective. Yet, several doctors who experienced the pandemic entirely from their laptop, disagreed. They felt that doctors who worked in hospitals were unqualified to comment on COVID.
Indeed, most We Want Them Infected (WWTI) doctors never treated COVID patients, and their ignorance was obvious in their every utterance. They completely disregarded frontline workers, and the phrase “no one who worked on a COVID unit would say anything like that” could appear after nearly quote I’ve shared from them. WWTI doctors were entirely incurious about what happened in hospitals while they were recording their YouTube videos and warning “against climate of fear on COVID”. They never said:
Since I don’t treat COVID patients, maybe I should pause and listen to doctors who do. They might have a perspective I lack.
Had WWTI doctors been willing to listen, they would have learned some valuable things. Most deaths occurred in older, sick people, but we all saw some young people die. Although death was the only negative consequence recognized by WWTI doctors, it was not COVID’s only bad outcome. Many people survived COVID, but were seriously injured by it. No one who worked on a COVID unit casually brushed aside what the virus could do with banal claims that “the old have a thousand-fold higher mortality risk than the young.“
Mostly, WWTI doctors would have learned that SARS-CoV-2 was hard to contain. The virus invariably found people when it was left to spread unchecked, overwhelming hospitals and morgues. No one who saw what it could do was under any illusion that vulnerable people could have been sealed in a magic bubble, as WWTI doctors claimed.
Indeed, we saw COVID spread widely within the hospital. Countless healthcare workers contracted the virus, and the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that 115,000 of them died from COVID by May 2021. Dr. James Mahoney was one of them. He was on the verge of retirement when the pandemic hit, but refused to abandon his community. According to the article A Legend At A Brooklyn Hospital Dies Of Covid-19: ‘He Ran Into The Fire’
Mahoney was well-trained to treat Covid-19 patients. And public hospitals, already stretched thin, were bracing for an influx of patients. So he went “running into the fire”, Melvin said. Brooklyn has had 40,000 Covid-19 cases, and the virus hit black and Latino communities the hardest.
“The last time I saw him was at the beginning of the pandemic,” Cavanagh said. “I said, are we going to get through this? And he said, oh yeah, we’re going to get through this.”
But in early April, Mahoney started coughing and running a fever. On Easter Sunday, after Chisolm recovered, Mahoney’s family noticed on a video chat that he didn’t look well. The next day, he was admitted to his own hospital, SUNY Downstate.
At first, Mahoney seemed to be improving – he gave his family a thumbs up on FaceTime. Then his health deteriorated and he was transferred to NYU Langone for a higher level of care. He died on 27 April.
Physicians at SUNY Downstate said Mahoney’s death has left a hole in the institution after his three decades there. “He was what we call a ‘lifer’” at the hospital, said colleague Alex Hieu Ly.
Dr. Mahoney was 62 and had worked in the hospital for 30 years. Real-world heroes like him were totally irrelevant to WWTI doctors. They never mentioned or considered them at all.
I can’t breathe again. I really regret not getting my vaccine. If I can do it all over again I would do it in a heartbeat to save my life.
Shortly before dying of Covid-19, a father in Los Angeles texted family members to express his regret over not getting vaccinated.
Christian Cabrera, 40, tested positive for the coronavirus around Christmas. Not long afterward, he was in an emergency room with pneumonia in both lungs.
“I can’t breathe again,” he texted his brother, according to KTLA. “I really regret not getting my vaccine. If I can do it all over again I would do it in a heartbeat to save my life. I’m fighting for my life here and I wish I [had] gotten vaccinated.”
This happened to many thousands of young people, and Dr. Abraar Karan, an infectious disease expert at Stanford, explained why no one who witnessed this would minimize the virus. He said:
One thing I guarantee you will notice if you pay attention, doctors who have cared for #COVID19 patients will never underestimate what this virus is capable of. The antivaxx, antimask pundits who have been tweeting from the safety of their home for the past two years often will.
I have yet to meet a fellow physician who has spent the majority of their time caring for these cases who would claim to know exactly what to expect from #SARSCoV2 — because we continue to be surprised. Surprised by people who die that shouldn’t. People who suffer for longer than we would expect. People who seem to get better & then suddenly turn for the worse. People who are doing poorly & who end up surviving.
Medicine humbles us as clinicians; this virus has too. Hearing non-clinicians downplay it after long days/weeks/months where we are working hard to try & save people’s lives Honestly- eventually you can’t help but feel like half of the people on here who claim to know what the right answer is or what’s “safe enough” are full of BS.
Because if you get sick, they won’t be responsible for it. They won’t be accountable to you, your family, your loved ones Your doctors will be at your bedside. Your antimask, antivaxx saviors will not. A common response I hear from sick patients once it’s too late — I wish I had listened.
Most of our doctors are really sheep. They’re not thinking people, they’re told what to do, they just do it. Partly that’s just really weak, dumb.
Instead of being curious and willing to learn from people like Dr. Karan, WWTI doctors mocked and berated healthcare workers who shared their experience from the frontlines and urged caution based on what they saw. For example, Dr. Scott Atlas said about doctors who suggested masks and vaccines:
I would say right to them they are a disgrace, a complete disgrace. I know that sounds very harsh but I mean this is an example of a couple things. Number one, seems like most of our doctors are really sheep. They’re not thinking people, they’re told what to do, they just do it. Partly that’s just really weak, dumb. I’m not being very articulate this morning, I’m sorry, but you know it’s just I’m beside myself. Partly they’re just cowards.
We have a tremendous void in courage in our country. Doctors enjoy a position of huge prestige but more importantly, trust.
Elsewhere, Dr. Atlas blamed doctors who treated patients for the loss of trust in the medical profession. He said:
I mean, the medical community really failed, and we see the results of their failure. First of all, you know, they’re trusted. You know, you know, I mean, we’re doctors, people are intimidated by doctors, but also we occupy a special position of trust in society, almost blind trust.
People depend on you, you have to take that role very seriously, though, how do what do I mean by that? That means when somebody comes in and asks you a question, you don’t just spit out a memorized guideline, you you explain what the data is, if they want to know, you don’t you don’t persuade by coercion and pressure, you persuade by showing people the facts.
I mean, your role is to be the the the information giver not to coerce people and they really failed. And I have to say, you know, doctors, it’s a disgrace what they did and how little they know about the data, a disgrace, in my opinion, but you see it in the polling, you know, you realize that pre pandemic, the trust high trust in doctors, 71%.
Now, January 2024, from 71% have plummeted to trust doctors a lot. Now they had answers 40%. It’s it’s very maybe continuing to drop.
As a reminder, Dr. Atlas is a radiologist who became famous for his TV appearances. He predicted that COVID would kill 10,000 Americans and that the mass infection of unvaccinated youth would lead to herd immunity. Today, he blames doctors who didn’t make these horrible predictions for the lack of trust in medicine.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is an exemplar of the laptop class, who teamed up with a pro-tobacco, child labor advocate, to advocate for herd immunity through mass infection. Dr. Bhattacharya also attacked frontline doctors who tried to limit the virus or corrected his factual errors. In an interview in 2022, he said:
If you think about medicine as a vocation, you’re supposed to devote your well-being to the life a patient that you are caring for…lockdowns actually reversed that and said look, ‘you the population should suffer so that my job in medicine can be easier‘, so a reversal of the norms of medicine where medicine serves people, not people serve medicine. The fact that medicine, especially the leaders of medicine were so strongly in favor of the lockdowns is a violation of the ethics of the medical profession. It essentially transforms the doctor-patient relationship to one where the patient serves the doctor rather than the other way around.
Dr. Bhattacharya felt it was unethical for doctors to have tired to limit COVID, even though our morgues were overflowing. He felt doctors just wanted their own jobs to be easier. They were being selfish.
(Free advice for you, Jonathan: maybe take an epidemiology class if you don’t want to keep embarrassing yourself in public further?)…
The unspoken root idea of his is that the general public owed it to doctors to not get covid because it would place doctors at risk of getting covid. Of course this is an inversion. Medical professionals serve the public, not the other way around.
Because he didn’t read my book, he didn’t address a single claim in it. Much of it is merely a collection of things he said, combined with headlines from the real-world. I don’t call him silly names.
I pity him,@surrealtruther. He seems like a man broken by an extended encounter between deeply held (but false) ideas about the way the world works and the way the world actually works.
Dr. Bhattacharya feels the kind of experience at gained by working Bellevue Hospital throughout the pandemic, teaches one nothing about how world actually works. Because I accurately quote him, I am a “broken man.”
On social media, Dr. Bhattacharya behaved childishly when discussing doctors who treat patients, calling them “covidian doctors.” Though his was normal and typical for him. He made disdainful comments about doctors who left X, precisely because of this sort of behavior.
Who needs it?
Doctors had enough of the smears, the schoolyard taunts, and the bad-faith engagement. They were tired of people like Dr. Bhattacharya blaming them and telling people not to trust them. It’s scary to think a sheltered health economist who behaves like this and who holds doctors in open contempt may be the head of the NIH next year.
Although many thousands of healthcare workers died of COVID, laptop class doctors felt doctors who worked in hospitals were lazy, dumb, cowardly, covidian sheep who didn’t understand how the world works. They felt doctors who treated COVID patients should have looked at the suffering and death that surrounded us and honored medical ethics by declaring- we need more people to get COVID. Moving forward, these doctors may be more powerful than ever, though they’ll always be safe from behind a laptop. We may soon discover what insults they’ll hurl at us when the next pandemic hits or, thanks to their efforts, measles and pertussis return.
Dr. Jonathan Howard is a neurologist and psychiatrist who has been interested in vaccines since long before COVID-19. He is the author of “We Want Them Infected: How the failed quest for herd immunity led doctors to embrace the anti-vaccine movement and blinded Americans to the threat of COVID.”
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