These blog posts are a compilation of Irwin’s op-eds, publications, media interviews, and a variety of other features.
If someone had suggested five months ago that we would be seeing more than 3 million cases and 135,000 COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. by mid-July, I wouldn’t have believed it.
But now it’s distinctly possible that, five months from now, half of all Americans could have been infected with SARS-CoV-2, and more than 800,000 Americans may die in this extraordinary outbreak. That is what many of our most prominent public-health experts now expect.
Donald Trump and his administration did not create the worst biological threat that the world has experienced in more than 100 years, but the American president’s incompetence, ignorance, and dishonesty in handling this crisis has been stunning. One hundred and twenty-seven thousand Americans are dead already, and that number will continue to rise.
Vice President Mike Pence’s status report Friday was so disconnected from reality that it can only be characterized as pandemic gaslighting. “All 50 states and territories across this country are opening up safely and responsibly” as “we flattened the curve,” he said, while insisting that “it’s almost inarguable that more testing is generating more cases.” That would be false, false, and false.
According to state health department data, there are currently 9,354 confirmed coronavirus infections in Oklahoma, up 5.1 percent from the previous day. “It’s likely that an event like this, at this particular moment, is going to be a super-spreader event,” Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University told The Daily Beast. Anthony Fauci, a leading infectious disease expert and key member of the White House coronavirus task force, confirmed that he would not attend, given the choice, citing his own high-risk demographic as a 79-year-old man.
It was already clear that Donald Trump’s policies, actions, and words have put millions of children at risk. But although the longest government shutdown in American history is coming to an end, this nearly 40 day financial crisis added a whole new dimension to the challenges facing children living in poor, working poor, and even many middle-class families.
It has become undeniable that after only two years, the Trump administration is already showing itself to be the most anti-child of any presidency in memory.
“People are seeing this as a personal decision, and it’s based on our own personal risk tolerance,” said Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness and a professor of public health and pediatrics at Columbia University. “That’s not public health, because in public health, your risk should not be my risk.”
As a physician, my task is to keep people safe and as healthy as possible. Medicines, including vaccines, play a big role in this undertaking. However, almost equally dangerous as viral spread is the spread of false hope. To pacify expectations, I often turn to my public health colleague, Irwin Redlener, MD, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, Columbia University: “Suggestions that oral polio vaccine may have a role in temporarily preventing Covid-19 are provocative, but not really supported by the kind of evidence that would make many of us optimistic.” Dr. Redlener was surprised by Dr. Fauci’s public support of OPV. “It’s far too early to suggest that OPV is some kind of miraculous, low-cost preventive measure,” added the professor of pediatrics.
Within 24 hours the World Health Organization made and then pulled back a critically important statement regarding the transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 global pandemic. According to Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s leading scientific voice on COVID-19, “We have a number of reports from countries who are doing very detailed contact tracing. They’re following asymptomatic cases, they’re following contacts and they’re not finding secondary transmission onward. It is very rare.”
Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University and an expert on U.S. readiness for pandemics, called it a “delusion of normalcy” to see gradual reopenings as an indication that any community—from New York to Washington—is out of the woods. But to be fair, said Redlener, “risky behavior in younger people is always a public health issue.”
That gamble is made worse by the recent reports that have shown, for children under 18, the potentially fatal multisystem inflammatory syndrome related to COVID-19.
“The fact that these organizations have found doctors who are willing to support a rightwing agenda designed to help Donald Trump against all scientific evidence and appropriate public health practices is shameful,” said Irwin Redlener, a professor of public health at Columbia University.
Critics notwithstanding, Brandon said the coalition recently spent $50,000 for videos on Facebook, Hulu and Twitter targeting independents and Republicans with the message that Covid-19 mostly hits the elderly to minimize risks for others.
