If there's anything as contagious as the novel coronavirus, it's the misinformation surrounding it.
In a campaign email sent out on Tuesday, First District Congressman Jim Hagedorn shared the flavor of the week, two doctors in Kern County, California:
These doctors make compelling points. I continue to push for a new strategy to reopen hospitals and medical clinics that were effectively shut down to prepare for a surge of coronavirus cases - a policy based upon wildly pessimistic and outdated models that estimated Minnesota deaths of 22,000.
We must restore timely, quality medical care and get health care professionals back to work. There are Americans, many with absolutely no symptoms, in need of immediate consultation, testing, diagnosis and life-saving surgery or treatment. Far too many citizens have died or are dying due to neglect for serious conditions like heart disease, hypertension, diabetes and cancer.
Had my kidney cancer diagnosis and treatment been delayed 30-60-90 days, it’s quite possible I would not be writing this today. We must help all residents in need of medical care. By the way, my treatments at the Mayo Clinic are going well, I feel terrific and have not missed one vote or day of work in Congress due to illness.
The need to reopen hospitals and clinics is especially pressing. As things stand, more Minnesotans will likely die from medical neglect, rather than COVID-19.
Curiously, the link in the email embedded under the screengrab doesn't lead to the Stacey Lennox article at PJ Media or the Facebook video itself, but to another Hagedorn hobbyhorse from an earlier email, Sources believe coronavirus outbreak originated in Wuhan lab as part of China's efforts to compete with US. More on that in a moment.
What Hagedorn and many other conservatives found convincing--doctors in scrubs sounding confident--was sent after the video was quickly debunked and rejected by the medical community.
The San Diego Mercury News reported in Cue the debunking: Two California doctors go viral with dubious COVID test conclusions:
They dressed in scrubs. They sounded scientific. And last week’s message from two Bakersfield doctors was exactly what many stuck-at-home Americans wanted to hear: COVID-19 is no worse than influenza, its death rates are low and we should all go back to work and school.
Drs. Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi, who own urgent care centers in the region, had called a press conference to release their conclusions about the results of 5,213 COVID-19 tests they had conducted at their centers and testing site. They claimed the results showed that the virus had spread further in the area, undetected, and thus wasn’t all that dangerous.
But public health experts were quick to debunk the doctors’ findings as misguided and riddled with statistical errors — and an example of the kind of misleading information they are forced to waste precious time disputing.
The doctors should never have assumed that the patients they tested — who came for walk-in COVID-19 tests or who sought urgent care for symptoms they experienced in the middle of a pandemic — are representative of the general population, said Dr. Carl Bergstrom, a University of Washington biologist who specializes in infectious disease modeling. He likened their extrapolations to “estimating the average height of Americans from the players on an NBA court.” And most credible studies of COVID-19 death rates in reality are far higher than the ones the doctors presented.
“They’ve used methods that are ludicrous to get results that are completely implausible,” Bergstrom said. . . .
The American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine (AAEM) issued a joint statement on the physician misinformation:
The American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine (AAEM) jointly and emphatically condemn the recent opinions released by Dr. Daniel Erickson and Dr. Artin Massihi. These reckless and untested musings do not speak for medical societies and are inconsistent with current science and epidemiology regarding COVID-19. As owners of local urgent care clinics, it appears these two individuals are releasing biased, non-peer reviewed data to advance their personal financial interests without regard for the public’s health.
COVID-19 misinformation is widespread and dangerous. Members of ACEP and AAEM are first-hand witnesses to the human toll that COVID-19 is taking on our communities. ACEP and AAEM strongly advise against using any statements of Drs. Erickson and Massihi as a basis for policy and decision making.
The link embedded under the screengrab of the article leads to an April 20 email from the Hagedorn campaign shared under the subject head A Chinese Coverup? Signed by the congressional candidate, the email centers around his response to the Fox News report, Sources believe coronavirus outbreak originated in Wuhan lab as part of China's efforts to compete with US:
Fox News and other media sources are reporting that U.S. officials are investigating that COVID-19 may have originated from a communist Chinese Wuhan bio lab. If true, it makes China’s coverup and delay to provide information about the dangerous nature and person-to-person spread of the virus all the more damning.
As I have said as a candidate and congressman, China is not our friend - China is our adversary. The United States must never again depend upon the communists for critical defense, medical, rare earth materials and components needed for our economy.
I am proud to be a leader in Congress standing for stronger and fairer trade agreements and a return of our manufacturing jobs from China. We must put to an end the communists’ cheating, currency manipulation, forced technology transfers and outright theft of our intellectual property. The Phase One deal with China, which increased agricultural purchases, was a good first step.
Until President Trump and congressional Republicans came along, the Chinese communists had been running over U.S. leaders and building up its economy, military and global sphere of influence for more than a generation. Gratefully, those days are over.
China’s irresponsible handling of this matter has led to enormous loss of life and economic devastation in the United States and around the world. The communists must be held accountable, financially and otherwise.
We're not clear about whether the Accelerated Urgent Care doctors' video clears Chinese communists of the "enormous loss of life" in the United State.
As far as the claim made in the Fox News report, it's unlikely, as much as Hagedorn wants to blame China for the disease. In What we know about the source of the coronavirus pandemic, Poynter Institute's Polifact doesn't rule it out. On Sunday, the BBC came to a similar conclusion in Coronavirus: US and China trade conspiracy theories; earlier it looked at the Fox report in Coronavirus: Is there any evidence for lab release theory?
On April 23, Vox reported on Why these scientists still doubt the coronavirus leaked from a Chinese lab. A day earlier Ryan Broderick reported in Buzzfeed, Scientists Haven’t Found Proof The Coronavirus Escaped From A Lab In Wuhan. Trump Supporters Are Spreading The Rumor Anyway:
There's much about the origins of the COVID-19 outbreak that scientists are still trying to discover. But animosity between the United States and China — and a bellicose American president — have made it harder to find the truth.
Both the doctors' misinformation and the Chinese lab conspiracy neatly fit into the character of the Jim Hagedorn profiled in Tim Murphy's classic 2014 profile House Candidate Called Female Senators “Undeserving Bimbos in Tennis Shoes” at Mother Jones.
Photo: Congressman Jim Hagedorn.
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