Thread by @VPrasadMDMPH

NYTimes pandemic coverage is so off the mark, it does not even get the errors correct.

Allow me to detail what the administration REALLY got wrong in 2021

🧵

nytimes.com/2022/01/23/us/…

The administration should have pursued a 1 dose vaccine strategy. Give 1 dose to more people and delay dose 2.

The UK did this, and multiple modeling papers show it would save more lives

Wrongly, Fauci disagreed, and they stuck to 1 dose & 21 and 28 day time table of vax

This time table meant that antibody durability was poorer than had they delayed (delays help Ab)

Adverse events (myocarditis) were greater, and it slowed vaccine rollout, leading to deaths

It was the first of many errors...

After vaccination, the administration should have said, you have reduced your risk of dying by a log

We debated IFR like hell in 2020, but it was clear vaccines had a nearly log fold reduction in death, which would put IFR in a range that restrictions made no sense

Cloth masking never had any good data -- that's why Fauci initially said as much in March 2020 on 60 mins-- the reversal was largely due to a social media campaign run by people with no idea how to evaluate biomedical evidence

cato.org/working-paper/…

Engineers and other 'mechanistic scientists' pushed a useless mask, now symbolic

They also torpedoed efforts to run cluster RCTs by poisoning equipoise with propaganda

Still, Biden admin could have saved the day, cut losses, and said:
After vaccination, lose the mask

It was the perfect moment to both encourage vaccination, and to push for a removal of restrictions

In fact the spring was the BEST time to live life;

Moreover, cloth masking (useless mask) after vaccination was absolutely pointless & ludicrous
medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-…

At a minimum, the administration should have run a cluster RCT, but they have run 0 RCTs of NPI this entire pandemic

That is a total public health failure!

A 1000 years from now, we will look like primitive & ignorant

Schools - the administration kept failing on schools. Not because they did not do enough, but because they encouraged the delusion it was high risk for kids.

Healthy kids have higher risk on car rides than covid at school

Flint is their failure

medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-…

The administration needed to disavow the teachers unions, which have done tremendous damage to kids & a generation, but they repeatedly failed to do so.

School closure had nothing to do with virus rates.
It happened in places left of center w strong unions.

When it comes to vaccine policy, they made every mistake possible

They failed to pull J&J promptly off the market

This lead to unnecessary harm
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

They failed to consider natural immunity

PSST it was really good

You did not need to fire these workers/ push them so hard

They focused so much on young people-- the wrong people

Pushing boosters down to 12 years olds? Pushing hard on EUA kids 5 to 11--- even while peer nations were cautious about these?

Simply put, they did not focus on the people who die of COVID in droves (older people)

Krause and Gruber at FDA had worked on vaccines for 30 years! They were right

And even Trump did not push them to resign.
The Biden administration did.
Unbelievable

Read vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/boosters-for…

The risk gradient for death by age was 10000x. -- there has never been a risk factor this powerful in all of human history, but the administration did not understand that, and have never leveraged it

Why are nursing homes UN-BOOSTED now?

They ignored the most plausible scenario that the vax would not hold the virus forever, and breakthroughs would occur, as known to happen with coronavirus, and pushed mandates which would not help

Now mandates are intellectually bankrupt. They cannot slow spread.

They fired health care workers with natural immunity only leaving them up a creek without a paddle when hospitals went under-staffed.

Vaccine mandates were not launched too late, they are not suitable for the fabric of America

I wrote about it here:
medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-…

And here:
medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-…

Biden's initial intuition about America was right

Reversing himself in the fall was the error

Every time they want to achieve a policy, they push an awful study out in MMWR

They want 5 year olds to vax, so they push that garbage diabetes study

This obliterates credibility

nytimes.com/2022/01/15/opi…

They have told many lies about science, perhaps many had noble intent, but all were detected and credibility is in the toilet

I detail them here
city-journal.org/public-healths…

The solutions were always clear:
Focus on old people
Let society return to normal
Demand RCTs powered for clinical outcomes for boosters/ additional shots
& For vaccines in young kids
Run RCTs of NPIs
Push schools hard
Disavow anyone blocking schools
And always tell the truth