What I saw was truly outrageous, requiring serious inquiry by the dean and the accrediting body
The Washington Free Beacon’s tagline is: Covering the enemies of freedom, the way the mainstream narrative won’t. Its Wikipedia page says it was:
Launched on February 7, 2012, as a project of the Center for American Freedom, a conservative advocacy group modeled on the liberal Center for American Progress. The website is financially backed by Paul Singer, an American billionaire hedge fund manager and Republican donor.
According to a recent article there titled ‘Pedagogical Malpractice’: Inside UCLA Medical School’s Mandatory ‘Health Equity’ Class:
Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School and one of the world’s foremost experts on obesity, said the curriculum “promotes extensive and dangerous misinformation.”
UCLA “has centered this required course on a socialist/Marxist ideology that is totally inappropriate,” said Flier, who reviewed the full syllabus and several of the assigned readings. “As a longstanding medical educator, I found this course truly shocking.”
One required reading lists “anti-capitalist politics” as a principle of “disability justice” and attacks the evils of “ableist heteropatriarchal capitalism.” Others decry “racial capitalism,” attack “growth-centered economic theories,” and call for “moving beyond capitalism for our health.”
On Twitter, Dr. Flier promoted this article and said:
Pedagogical malpractice at @UCLA medical school. I was prepared to see some questionable things in the mandatory “Health Equity” course, but what I saw was truly outrageous, requiring serious inquiry by the dean and the accrediting body.
Scientists who express different views on Covid-19 should be heard, not demonized
Dr. Flier didn’t always encourage such antagonism about those who held “different views”. At the start of the pandemic, along with Dr. Vinay Prasad, he wrote an essay titled: Scientists Who Express Different Views on Covid-19 Should Be Heard, Not Demonized which said:
We can’t allow questions of science, medicine, and public health to become captives of tribalized politics. Today, more than ever, we need vigorous academic debate… We believe that the bar to stifling or ignoring academics who are willing to debate their alternative positions in public and in good faith must be very high… These critical decisions should be influenced by scientific insights independent of political philosophies and party affiliations. They must be freely debated in the academic world without insult or malice to those with differing views
Dr. Flier’s article was primarily a defense of Dr. John Ioannidis, who at the time said:
If only part of resources mobilized to implement extreme measures for COVID-19 had been invested towards enhancing influenza vaccination uptake, tens of thousands of influenza deaths might have been averted.
Yet, as COVID, not the flu, overflowed morgues in NYC and elsewhere, Dr. Flier felt this was just a “different view” that should not be rejected outright, but instead should be rewarded with “vigorous academic debate”. His article concluded:
Scientific consensus is important, but it isn’t uncommon when some of the most important voices turn out to be those of independent thinkers, like John Ioannidis, whose views were initially doubted. That’s not an argument for prematurely accepting his contestable views, but it is a sound argument for keeping him, and others like him, at the table.
Dr. Flier felt it was important that certain privileged individuals not be subject to upsetting words, and on more than one occasion said such verbal unpleasantries posed a “risk even more toxic and deadly than Covid-19”. As a reminder, tens of millions of people died of COVID. Thankfully, Dr. Ioannidis and Emily Oster seem to be doing just fine.
In contrast, when it comes to health equity courses, Dr. Flier is ready with the insult and malice. He’s prepared to bypass vigorous academic debate and skip right to a serious inquiry by the dean and the accrediting body. He doesn’t seem to feel he has anything to learn from listening to others on the topic. His attitude is basically, Those Who Express Different Views on Healthy Equity Should Be Demonized, Not Heard.
A serious inquiry from powerful figures would, of course, intimidate and silence those being investigated. Dr. Flier seems to perceive certain ideas as so dangerous and powerful, that he doesn’t trust medical students to even be exposed to them, as if reading an essay about socialist/Marxist ideology would instantly convert UCLA medical students (stop and think about who is admitted into UCLA medical school) into socialist and Marxists. He portrays these students – the most outstanding among their peers – as delicate, highly-impressionable students need a safe space to shield them from different ideas- and the people who hold them. In reality, the handful of students who actually do the reading aren’t being exposed to these ideas for the first time and they are perfectly capable of processing the information on its merits.
Like nearly every other medical professional, I’ve never encountered the words “ableist heteropatriarchal capitalism” before, and I don’t envision a future where such rhetoric becomes a routine part of hospital life. After all, the article that mentioned “ableist heteropatriarchal capitalism”, Disability Justice – a Working Draft– written in 2015 on a blog called Sins Invalid. It has a total of 11 comments. I am not sure if it had any real-world impact. Yet, Dr. Flier believes it threatens the core of medicine today.
A Phony Invitation for “Discussion and Debate”
However, my purpose here is not to defend the curriculum at UCLA, but rather to show that health inequities are real, consequential, and often glossed over by those not impacted by them. Indeed, the causal way Dr. Flier approached pandemic tragedies shows why it’s crucial for medical students to learn about this topic.
In a previous essay titled A Phony Invitation for “Discussion and Debate” I discussed this Tweet of Dr. Flier’s:
Dr. Flier then linked to an article titled Covid Vaccines Shouldn’t Be ‘Routine’ for Kids by Dr. Vinay Prasad, a pro-infection, anti-vaccine doctor whose misinformation has been discussed here many times previously. Naturally, the arguments Dr. Prasad made to let millions of unvaccinated children contract a potentially deadly virus when a strongly effective vaccine was was available were not “quite reasonable”, as Dr. Flier claimed. They were, in fact, absurd.
Covid Death Rate Among White Children Nearly Three Times Higher Than Black Kids
While Dr. Flier still refuses to discuss or debate this topic with me, one wonders whether he would have treated pediatric COVID with a smidgeon of gravity, as something more than pseudo-academic exercise, had his community been more impacted by COVID. Would he have issued fake invitations to discuss and debate farcical arguments against a strongly effective vaccine if the headlines read: Covid Death Rate Among White Children Nearly Three Times Higher Than Black Kids or White Children Disproportionately Impacted by Severe COVID-19 and Related Illness, Data Reveals?
Obviously, we’ll never know. We only know what happened in this world. And in this world the headlines read: Covid Death Rate Among Black Children Nearly Three Times Higher Than White Kids and Children of Color Disproportionately Impacted by Severe COVID-19 and Related Illness, Data Reveals.
While it’s absolutely true that health equities can be taught better, they also need to be taken more seriously. Absurdities in the curriculum is not a valid reason to dismiss the entire project. However, some privileged doctors were so intent on creating a moral panic about these occasional absurdities that they never paused to humbly consider whether they might have something to learn about the topic. Maybe if they had been a bit more open and curious about the impact of health inequities, and a bit less focused on performative virtue-signalling, they wouldn’t have dismissed pediatric COVID so casually.
Indeed, Dr. Flier is not at all perturbed by doctors who spread “extensive and dangerous misinformation” regarding vaccines. In fact, he promotes and amplifies these voices. Instead, he is truly outraged by an overly-woke curriculum. In a pandemic where unvaccinated children suffered needlessly, he feels this curriculum needs an investigation at the highest level.
While I won’t argue that future doctors need to be warned about “ableist heteropatriarchal capitalism”, it’s vital that they learn that there are significant inequities in how COVID- and many other health issues- impact various communities. Because also in this world, some doctors treated a dangerous virus as nothing more than topic for an abstract, salon-style debate, as if there were no real-world consequences to withholding a strongly effective from children as the virus swirled around them.
Sadly, there were real-world consequences. Real children- mostly children of color– suffered grave, preventable harms because doctors, sheltered from the consequences of their words, misinformed their parents about the risks of COVID and the value of the vaccine. This was a bigger problem than medical students reading an essay about “ableist heteropatriarchal capitalism”. This was truly outrageous and it shouldn’t really be up for “discussion and debate.”
