“The bigger problem is that lockdowners like Howard (an NYU doctor, I think), think that living your life is an irresponsible act.”
In my first two articles on the COVID Amnesia Project (CAP), I discussed deliberate efforts to erase both the horrific scenes of spring 2020 and the disinformation spread by We Want Them Infected (WWTI) doctors at that time.
With this in mind, let’s review my 2020 output, though there was very little of it. In February 2020 I Tweeted that I was “concerned” about COVID. “This has the potential to be a worldwide disaster,” I said. Yet, I wrote just one article that year, in December, titled I’m A Neurologist Who Happily Volunteered for the AstraZeneca Vaccine Trials. Here’s What People Are Getting Wrong About the Process. That article described my experience in a vaccine RCT and what I witnessed in NYC hospitals 6 years ago. I wrote:
The hospital intercom was the busiest I’ve ever heard it, with calls for the “airway team” blaring throughout the hospital every five minutes it seemed. I saw patients as young as 23 die alone, with no one by their side.
However, I didn’t start writing about COVID in earnest until May 2021, as the last mitigations were vanishing. That article was about also vaccines. I never once “called for” lockdowns, mandates, or any other mitigation measure, not that it would have mattered had I had done so. For better or worse, I am just a lone doctor, not some powerful mover of world events. Politicians didn’t base their decisions off of my Tweets and blogs.
Despite this, in his fake “review” of WWTI, which he later admitted he never read, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya called me “inane,” “unhinged,” and wrote about my “covidian mindset.” He also wrote the following:
The bigger problem is that lockdowners like Howard (an NYU doctor, I think), think that living your life is an irresponsible act. Sending your kids to school is an irresponsible act. The implication is that unless you comply with his prescription — lockdown with no logical endpoint — you are irresponsible.
Although Dr. Bhattacharya had to let everyone know he was so important he couldn’t even be bothered to look up where I work, he was nonetheless certain I was a “lockdowner” and that my “prescription” was “lockdown with no logical endpoint.”
However, Dr. Bhattacharya’s juvenile insults reveal much more than his dishonest, unprofessional straw man arguments and utter inability to respond to WWTI, which merely documented his words. Such revisionist history is vital to the CAP, which seeks to memory-hole who was in charge in 2020 and the decisions those leaders made at the time.
“President Trump Has Extended His Stay-At-Home Guidelines”
Unlike Dr. Bhattacharya, we are mature, professional adults, and we can honestly remember who had power 6 years ago. It turns out, Donald Trump was president when the pandemic started, and the country locked down while he ran the show. The article President Trump Has Extended His Stay-At-Home Guidelines quoted him as saying:
The peak, the highest point of death rate, is likely to hit in two weeks. Nothing would be worse than declaring victory before the victory is won. The better you do, the faster this whole nightmare will end.
Trump later defended his stay-at-home guidance by saying:
We did all the right moves … If we didn’t do what we did, you would’ve had a million people die, maybe more. Maybe 2 million people die.
Mar 30, 2020
Similarly, Ron DeSantis was the governor of Florida in 2020, and after consulting with Trump, he ordered lockdowns there, not me or anyone else. According to the article Florida Governor Orders Statewide Lockdown:
Florida has now joined the list of states that are ordering residents to remain in their homes for all but essential activities to help stop the spread of the coronavirus. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis made the announcement at an afternoon briefing. It was just a few hours after he spoke to President Trump. DeSantis said he’s issuing an executive order that will direct “all Floridians to limit movements and personal interactions outside the home to only those necessary to obtain or provide essential services or essential activities.”
The duration and severity of DeSantis’s lockdowns have also fallen victim to the CAP. According to the article Ron Desantis Claims Florida Lockdowns Lasted Weeks, But Some Of His Own Orders Lasted Months:
And while DeSantis said state lockdowns existed for only a few weeks, the phased reopening of Florida lasted through most of the year. Schools remained closed for the remainder of the 2019-20 school year, and had social distancing requirements when the new school year started in the fall.
It wasn’t until early June, when a second phase of reopening occurred in most of the state, that bars, movie theaters and casinos could reopen. At that point, they still had to limit occupancy to 50% normal levels.
It was not until late September, five months after the lockdown started, that DeSantis preempted most restrictions on businesses. The state entered its Phase Three Reopening on Sept. 26, a step that had been delayed as Florida saw infections skyrocket over the summer.
But even at that point, DeSantis allowed local governments to limit restaurant capacity to 50%.
Even Dr. Bhattacharya’s career as a COVID pundit began with this sentence 6-year-ago:
If it’s true that the novel coronavirus would kill millions without shelter-in-place orders and quarantines, then the extraordinary measures being carried out in cities and states around the country are surely justified.
I never said anything like that.
“Florida’s response to the pandemic was a tremendous success.”
Despite all this, Dr. Bhattacharya literally “loves” Trump today. He also campaigned for DeSantis and routinely praises his COVID policies. “Florida’s response to the pandemic was a tremendous success,” he said.
The reasons for Dr. Bhattacharya’s glowing embrace of these lockdowners are obvious- politics, power, and tribalism. He hitched his wagon to their stars, and so he needs to erase what they did in 2020.
More than this, Dr. Bhattacharya seeks to displace their actions on to us, his critics and doctors who worked in hospitals, unlike him. In order to spread doubt and anger, he smears us as “lockdowners” and “covidian doctors” in his online temper tantrums. In his telling, because we had the audacity to accurately report what happened when COVID spread uncontrolled, everything that people hated about the pandemic is entirely our fault. Meanwhile, Dr. Bhattacharya absolves the virus all guilt and the portrays the politicians who actually ordered lockdowns- his political benefactors- as heroic visionaries.
Fortunately, we can resist Dr. Bhattacharya’s revisionist fantasy and reject his attempts to recruit us into his CAP. The next time he blathers on about the unspeakable horrors of lockdowns, we can remember that he has nothing but praise and sweet nothings for the politicians who actually ordered them.