Thread by @dianaberrent

The @NewYorker chose not to publish my Letter to the Editor regarding @DhruvKhullar's piece on #LongCovid.
newyorker.com/magazine/2021/…
A 🧵...
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The @NewYorker’s first article on #LongTermCovid, published in the September 27, 2021 issue, was a profound affront to everyone suffering the very real long-term sequalae of even mild and asymptomatic cases of #Covid_19.
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It is riddled with errors and was reported under false pretenses. @DhruvKhullar pitched this story to me as a personal profile – documenting how I started the world’s largest Covid movement, @Survivor_Corps.
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I worked with him for three months giving him unfettered access to my personal and work life. He abused that relationship and violated the tenets of journalistic integrity by writing, not a profile, but a damning referendum on whether #LongCovid exists.
(Spoiler: It does).
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Whereas the author had access to the leading scientific minds on the subject he did not interview a single doctor or scientist knowledgeable about this vexing and often debilitating panoply of symptoms that linger long after the virus;
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Notably, he did he interview a single patient currently battling Long-Term Covid.

Building on a long history of gaslighting people with chronic disease (notably a cohort that skews female) Dr. Khullar was dismissive and offensive.
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Rather than interview the leading drs and scientists w/ whom @Survivor_Corps works, he chose @VPrasadMDMPH, an oncologist at @UCSFHospitals @UCSF best known for his anti-masking rhetoric.
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.@VPrasadMDMPH plays at the fringe of medicine, dabbling in anti-Semitism, more keen on being provocative than furthering science.
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Contrary to Khullar’s “both sides approach” there is no real debate about whether or not people are suffering long after they are past the “acute” stage of Covid.
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There are Post-Covid Care Centers opening at hospitals around the country. The NIH has been entrusted with 1.15 billion dollars to study Long-Term Covid. Congress has held hearings.

Khullar and Prasad occupy a tent of their own in their skepticism of Long Covid.
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Khullar, after an unnecessarily graphic description of Heidi Ferrer’s suicide due to #LongCovid (in which he reported key details incorrectly), questioned whether or not Ferrer really had Covid in April of 2020 when Covid tests were almost impossible to find and often faulty.
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He ignored the inconvenient truth that Ferrer eventually received a Long Covid diagnosis and referral to the @CedarsSinai Post-Covid Care Center.

He was entrusted with this highly sensitive story and squandered it in sensationalism and doubt.
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As both a doctor and journalist @DhruvKhullar should be ashamed. He owes a true apology not only to Ferrer’s family but to the entire #LongCovid community.
@GirltoMom @NickGuthe
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Khullar stated that I was not constrained by science, something I believe would be contradicted by the many doctors and scientists with whom I work (and would have stated had he bothered to interview any of them).
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@hmkyale @VirusesImmunity @DrMJoyner @ACasadevall1 @kavitapmd

He dismissed the many papers and studies I have co-authored as mere “Facebook polls”.
Links here:
medrxiv.org/content/10.110…
medrxiv.org/content/10.110…
medrxiv.org/content/10.110…
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. @DhruvKhullar was fast and loose with his facts and biased in his narrative. In doing so he offered insult to injury to the tens of millions of Americans suffering from #LongCovid.
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Perhaps Dr. Khullar would benefit from reading through the New Yorker’s archives and focusing on the work of doctors who listened to and respected patients.
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I would ask him to pay particular attention to Oliver Sacks’ 2005 warning that a novel flu virus could cause a shadow pandemic of post-viral neurological complications similar to the encephalitis lethargica that followed the 1918 influenza epidemic.
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Sacks and Vilensky wrote in a 2005 @nytimes Op-Ed:

“Research has indeed suggested a recurring association, since the time of Hippocrates, between influenza epidemics and encephalitis-like diseases”.
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nytimes.com/2005/11/16/opi…

. @DhruvKhullar's article was a stain on the @NewYorker’s long history of credible medical reporting; the record should be corrected.
@JaneMayerNYer @adamgopnik @emilynussbaum @sbg1 @JiayangFan @tnyCloseRead @lawrence_wright @adamentous @ericlach @erinoverbey @suehalpernVT
/end

* he did NOT interview a single patient