Straying from Science: Doctor-Pundit News Clip Library**** (Updated Sep 29 2023)
#23 Doctor-pundit Monica Gandhi has degrees from fancy schools, but her "gish gallop" communication pattern hides the misinformation super-spreading she leaves in her wake.
Contents:
Spring 2021
Fall 2021
Winter 2021-22
Spring 2022
Summer 2022
Winter 2022-2023
Summer 2023
Fall 2023
Introduction: Dr. Monica Gandhi dispensed sound science in COVID year one. But in year two, she veered from evidence and lurched into repetitive incorrect forecasts.
Dr. Gandhi is not off the deep end, like, say, the signatories of anti-vaccine herd immunity Great Barrington Declaration proclamations which shall not be named here. But that’s why she’s such a potent vector of misinformation, she’s subtle. She’s against masks while vaccinations are still rolling out. She confuses people while admonishing public health authorities for being unclear.
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Infection-induced immunity is uncalibrated, with different doses for every person’s exposure. This makes the following yellow-underlined statement below impossible to verify.
This L.A. Times reprint ran in the Wisconsin State Journal on March 1, 2021:
Spring 2021
In spring of COVID year two, Dr. Gandhi cited a non-peer-reviewed preprint study to give false assurance that teen vaccines were unnecessary for population herd immunity. She knows too much about HIV to make the second mistake listed here, and probably simply misspoke when she claimed that HIV stops mutating as it continues to transmit.
Apr 23 2021 Only One Vaccine Is OK’d for Older Teens. It’s Also the Hardest to Manage in Rural America. (KHN) - "The debate over whether to vaccinate younger kids as a means to end the pandemic may soon be moot, though, said Dr. Monica Gandhi, chief of the Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases and Global Medicine at the University of California-San Francisco. She pointed to a recent study out of Israel — a nation ahead of the rest of the world in its vaccine effort — which showed that infection rates declined even without immunizing children younger than 16. That study has yet to be peer-reviewed.”
Jun 21 2021 Why You Shouldn’t Worry About the Delta Variant (if You’re Vaccinated) (Slate) - "Monica Gandhi: At the very beginning of the HIV epidemic, everything seemed scary. ... And then I knew something else from HIV, which is that a virus can't keep on mutating forever."
Fall 2021
In fall after schools had opened, then many closed briefly to circuit-break student and staff COVID infections, Dr. Gandhi said an infection brought as much immunity as a vaccine. She said infection should be counted as a vaccine passport as was happening in Europe. But in Europe, the proof of prior infection was only useable as a vaccine passport for three to six months, depending on location. Dr. Gandhi appears to have skimmed headlines and missed that part because clips show she suggested infection-induced immunity lasted indefinitely.
Perhaps Dr. Gandhi was so busy doing multiple media appearances per week that she missed headlines which reported juvenile COVID fatalities, because she overtly downplayed the benefits of child vaccinations.
Sep 13 2021 Vaccinating people who have had covid-19: why doesn’t natural immunity count in the US? (BMJ) - "The substantial number of infections, coupled with the increasing scientific evidence that natural immunity was durable, led some medical observers to ask why natural immunity didn’t seem to be factored into decisions about prioritising vaccination." ... "'The CDC could say [to people who had recovered], very well grounded in excellent data, that you should wait 8 months,' Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist at University of California San Francisco, told Medpage Today in January. She suggested authorities ask people to 'please wait your turn.'" ... "'Starting from back in November, we’ve had a lot of really important studies that showed us that memory B cells and memory T cells were forming in response to natural infection,' says Gandhi. Studies are also showing, she says, that these memory cells will respond by producing antibodies to the variants at hand. Gandhi included a list of some 20 references on natural immunity to covid in a long Twitter thread supporting the durability of both vaccine and infection induced immunity.12 'I stopped adding papers to it in December because it was getting so long,' she tells The BMJ."
Oct 25 2021 Fact checking Florida Surgeon General Ladapo: COVID, vaccine comments at odds with CDC (Tallahassee Democrat) - "One expert tended to agree with Ladapo that health officials shouldn't downplay natural immunity. 'To deny natural immunity does not generate trust,' Dr. Monica Gandhi of the University of California, San Francisco told USA TODAY."
Oct 27 2021 COVID-19 risks in kids are small, but vaccines can still save lives, experts say (Los Angeles Times) - "COVID-19 can be a leading cause of pediatric death even with the low chances of children dying of the disease because most of the time 'children don’t die' at high rates for any reason, said Dr. Monica Gandhi, a UC San Francisco infectious-diseases expert. But during the Delta variant surge, in places with low rates of adult vaccination, 'kids got a lot of cases, and there were more hospitalizations in children than we have ever seen before.'"
Oct 28 2021 News Analysis: It’s harder to justify COVID vaccine for children if pandemic’s end is near (Los Angeles Times) - "'But those racing to immunize schoolchildren should be ready to acknowledge that younger kids are at lower risk of severe COVID illness than are adults,' said Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease expert at UC San Francisco. 'The vote came in, and it was like, Yay, we’ll be on fairgrounds vaccinating all the kids next week,' she said. ‘In effect, while adults crowd into sports arenas, bars and restaurants to eat, drink and cheer unmasked, they are pushing for children get the vaccine before all of the safety concerns have been resolved.’”
Oct 29 2021 “Omg it’s worse than I thought. HIV can’t keep mutating forever? That’s literally disinformation.” (Twitter.com/JeremyFaust) -
Nov 07 2021 Frank Bures: More perspectives on vaccination after COVID infection (Winona Daily News) - "A very comprehensive article by a medical writer, Jennifer Block, in the Sept. 13, 2021, British Medical Journal (BMJ) put forth many experts’ viewpoints. One is from Monica Gandhi, M.D., infectious disease expert from San Francisco and prolific writer on COVID. She cites a list of over 20 references that memory B and memory T cells (the ones that kill the virus directly) to the natural infection will produce enough antibodies."
Nov 12 2021 San Francisco was great at lockdowns. What’s the plan for recovery? Mayor Breed downplays the office vacancies hindering The City’s economic rebound (San Francisco Examiner) - "'I think we can drop all of the indoor mask mandates now. San Francisco has a really high vaccination rate,' said Monica Gandhi, who leads the Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases and Global Medicine at UCSF. 'The City is not showing optimism and confidence in the vaccines.' Gandhi believes the emphasis on COVID also distracts from other pressing health emergencies The City is facing, including opioid overdoses which outpaced COVID-19 deaths by three to one in 2020. 'It isn’t the job of public health to keep people away from each other anymore with this level of transmission,' she said.
Other infectious disease experts strongly disagree, arguing that pruning back safety measures could supercharge a COVID spike this winter."
Nov 15 2021 COVID expert walks back criticism of Berkeley health officials over Cal football situation (San Jose Mercury News) - "Dr. Monica Gandhi, the infectious disease expert who criticized public health officials’ handling of the Cal football program’s COVID issues last week, would like a do-over. 'I should not have commented without knowing the details,' Gandhi told the Bay Area News Group in an email exchange Sunday." ... "All in all, there were 47 positive tests within the 150-person (approximate) program, including players, coaches and staff. Of the positives, 31 were symptomatic, although it’s not known how many players — they reportedly are 99 percent vaccinated — tested positive or had symptoms."
Nov 16 2021 California students can get vaccinated. When will the state let them take off their masks? (Fresno Bee) - "'California’s children continue to endure greater in-school restrictions than most states,' Dr. Jeanne Noble, director of COVID response at the University of California, San Francisco’s Emergency Department and Dr. Monica Gandhi, director of the UC San Francisco Center for AIDS research, wrote in a recent letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom and other state leaders. 'Children and their families see no end in sight to restrictions, as there are currently no guideposts to indicate when they will be loosened or retired.'"
Nov 21 2021 San Francisco led on COVID lockdowns, vaccine rules. Where is Breed’s reopening plan? SF leaders need clear course of action to revitalize The City’s economic heart (San Francisco Examiner) - “'Fundamentally, we have to shift our thinking away from case counts to being concerned about what led to lockdowns, mass distancing, contact tracing, and testing to begin with, which was severe disease,' said Dr. Monica Gandhi of the University of California, San Francisco. Gandhi said data on hospitalizations and deaths, rather than case counts, should guide The City’s public health response. She worried that an overly fearful approach could raise doubts about vaccine effectiveness."
Winter 2021-22
In winter Dr. Gandhi brashly claimed COVID wouldn’t swamp hospitals in one metropolitan area. This OpEd ran on Christmas day.
Just two weeks later, on January 8, a headline in that region’s newspaper directly contradicted Gandhi’s confident prediction. This story cited hospitals reporting staffing shortages caused by Omicron-fueled patient surges necessitating National Guard support.
Unchastened, Dr. Gandhi was quoted on January 9, repeating her forecast that was incorrect for Delta variant: that Omicron variant was the beginning of the end of the pandemic.
Dec 25 2021 Immune cells mean omicron won’t swamp hospitals in vaccinated areas In L.A. County, we don’t expect a repeat of last year (Washington Post) - By Michael Daignault and Monica Gandhi "A bout of covid is also known to generate these B cells, and B cells generated as a result of vaccination should be just as long-lasting, according to various studies."
Jan 8 L.A. County reports highest one-week coronavirus total of pandemic (Los Angeles Times) - "Los Angeles continued to see an Omicron-fueled surge in coronavirus cases Saturday, as staffing shortages necessitated the deployment of California National Guard troops to testing sites and led the state to permit hospitals to relax rules about letting infected workers return to work."
Jan 9 Omicron could have a silver lining by boosting immunity, some experts say. But don’t bet on it. (Washington Post) - "Monica Gandhi, a physician and colleague of Wachter’s at UC-San Francisco, said in an email that the spread of omicron could signal the approach of the 'endgame' of the pandemic, with the virus becoming endemic — meaning it would continue to circulate at modest levels but not cause society-disrupting outbreaks.
The aggressively mixed messages coming from Dr. Gandhi stood out—this track record goes beyond nuance. Dr. Gandhi seems too smart not to course-correct, but so far she hasn’t. Until that happens, this far in the pandemic, using this doctor pundit as a source may prolong transmission.
Few would advise contracting the flu in order to build immunity. Why can’t people shake that notion for COVID-19?:
Jan 7 Contemplating a COVID party for your kids? It’s still a bad idea (Los Angeles Times) - “Now the idea of ‘chicken pox parties’ is back — but this time, it’s for COVID-19. The Omicron variant seems less dangerous than earlier versions of the coronavirus and harder for kids to avoid now that they’re back in school, so why not get it out of the way?”
Spring 2022
May 15 Medhi Hasan Questions Doctor On Covid Predictions [Video] (MSNBC) - Mehdi interviews Dr. Monica Gandhi about her claims about the pandemic and ending restrictions early.
Summer 2022
The same week a study (not yet peer-reviewed) published showing a statistically significant percentage of vaccinated people do, in fact, contract long COVID [link: June 18 Risk of long COVID associated with delta versus omicron variants of SARS-CoV-2 (The Lancet) ], Dr. Gandhi pubished an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle saying the opposite, and cited an expired preprint as evidence.
It was also two weeks after Gandhi’s colleague Dr. Wachter announced his vaccinated wife was exhibiting her fifth week of post-COVID symptoms. [Link: June 04 UCSF’s Wachter says his wife now likely has long COVID and her health is ‘not great’ (San Francisco Chronicle).] Long COVID is defined as two or more months of of post-COVID symptoms.
In the OpEd, Dr. Gandhi also reassured the public that all infections build immunity, and cited misinformation meme on “Super Immunity” which was born not in a scientific journal, but has been spread by misinformation actors.
PRE-BUNK: A common misinformation tactic is to flood the reader, or the editor, with a plethora of citations in your document. Embed them in like sardines. That’s what Dr. Gandhi did here. A few cited references are sound. Many are not.
June 25 Monica Gandhi: Nine things we still need to do to coexist with COVID-19 (San Francisco Chronicle) - “This decoupling of cases from severe disease speaks to a high degree of immunity in the United States, both from a first dose vaccination rate of 83% among those 5 and older along with a natural infection rate of at least 60% among adults and 75% among children up to 18 years of age. Hybrid immunity (vaccination and infection) may be the strongest form of protection. And the U.S., depending on the region, now has high rates of this ‘super immunity.’”
DEBUNK: The world of journalism is still adapting to this scientific age brought upon by the flood of preprints *and* peer-reviewed studies about the worst pandemic in a century. This virus still mutates; it is a mobile target with many moving parts. Dr. Gandhi’s June 2022 OpEd mixes information with misinformation and serves the public a false reassurance stew. There is no such thing as “Super Immunity”. In her OpEd, Dr. Gandhi put the phrase “Super Immunity” in quotes, and hyperlinked the phrase to a non-peer reviewed article about “hybrid” immunity which doesn’t mention “super” even once. In the first variant wave of COVID, a peer-reviewed study found select incidences of “hybrid immunity” but that study does not apply to Omicron variants BA.4, BA.5, BA.12.1, all of which are showing immunity escape traits.
Winter 2022-2023
PRE-PREBUNK 0: Dr. Gandhi says in this OpEd both a) hospitals have stopped testing incoming patients for COVID and b) hospitals aren’t noticing severe COVID patients in their rooms. 🙈 She ignores her first claim to conclude that hospitals seeing far less COVID means there is simply less COVID illness in the population.
PRE-PREBUNK 1: Pinning hopes on a “viral interference” hypothesis, Gandhi in the role of doctor-pundit is re-casting infection outbreaks of one virus as hopeful news, on the theory one infection interferes with the body’s capacity to host other infections. She builds on an argument that it wasn’t social distancing or masking that kept flu rates low in 2020, 2021, but rather COVID, which “crowded out” other infections in the population via chemical messenger interferons. But viral interference is largely disproven in these next two articles (note the hedge “may” in this article title): Nov 28 2022 Competition between respiratory viruses may hold off a ‘tripledemic’ this winter (Science) - “Still, interference isn’t a sure thing when multiple viruses are circulating. A household survey of 2117 people in Nicaragua, for example, found both flu and COVID-19 cases peaked at the same time in February, suggesting ‘limited viral interference,’ the researchers concluded in a preprint.”
PRE_PREBUNK 2: Dec 16 Prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 and Influenza Coinfection and Clinical Characteristics Among Children and Adolescents Aged <18 Years Who Were Hospitalized or Died with Influenza — United States, 2021–22 Influenza Season (CDC’s MMWR) - “Forty-four influenza-associated pediatric deaths were reported to the Influenza-Associated Pediatric Mortality Surveillance System during the 2021–22 influenza season, including seven (16%) decedents who had SARS-CoV-2 coinfection.“
PREBUNK: Headlines abound of the flu, COVID, RSV “tripledemic” this winter. Staying true to form, Dr. Ghandi begins her Winter 2022 Time magazine OpEd by saying this time last year we saw the first of many Omicron surges. Then she launches into her signature forecast which apes all her previous forecasts of optimism and reassurance this point in time is a hopeful milestone in the COVID journey:
Dec 13 [Misinformation: ] The Case for Cautious COVID Optimism This Winter (Time) - “A combination of factors—a high level of population immunity, Omicron family antigenic drift, convergence of mutations that seem to have hit an evolutionary ceiling, almost nonexistent severe COVID illness in the hospital, and viral interference from RSV and Influenza surges—means we are in a surprisingly good place with COVID-19 in winter 2022-23.” “The CDC in fact in September advised that hospitals could stop routine pre-admission testing for COVID. But many hospitals and health care systems have been reluctant to relinquish this outdated practice.” 🙈
DEBUNK: While doctor-pundit Monica Gandhi occasionally advocates people take a base layer of COVID vaccines, the headlines and leads of her OpEds are misleading to short-attention spanned audience members. She remains a potent a misinformation blender agent for antivaccine interests. Unlike other vectors of misinformation with M.D. job titles with other concentrations of practice, her area of practice happens to be infectious diseases. That makes her misinformation misfires especially harmful to causes of long COVID containment.
PRE-BUNK: Monica Gandhi uses a “gish gallop” rhetorical technique to get her low-rigor OpEds past overworked general non-science news editors and into print under established mastheads. A gish gallop is, according to Wikipedia a “a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm their opponent by providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments.” Here is just a small excerpt from her gish-gallop OpEd from Sunday’s paper:
Jan 21 COVID is endemic. Here’s how Monica Gandhi says we keep it that way (San Francisco Chronicle) - …”For those who become sick due to COVID, a five-day isolation period recommended by the CDC still seems prudent. But as population immunity continues to build, we should look to transition to a shorter time frame followed by masking and eventually a ‘stay home when sick’ model. This recommendation needs to be accompanied by national paid sick leave policies.”…
DEBUNK: “Endemic” has been misused so much during the three past years of COVID it has now mutated into a word with two simultaneously opposite definitions. It needs to be quarantined from the rest of the words in our language to recover from COVID-era abuse.
Summer 2023
It’s disappointing that Monica Gandhi was able to get a book proposal greenlit by Mayo Clinic Press. While endemic is not a desired public health goal for any infectious disease, Monica Gandhi titled her book “Endemic: A Post-Pandemic Playbook” and it hit store shelves July 11th.
It is audacious of me to critique any non-medical department of Mayo Clinic, but Monica Gandhi is a special case in that she fooled even me at first.
PRE-BUNK: Monica Gandhi displays her trademark hubris in the opening of this OpEd, and her justification for ignoring science and ignoring news reports by saying one infectious disease taught her everything she needed to know about managing a totally different infectious disease. HIV is the same as COVID in Monica Gandhi’s imagination, the introduction of the next OpEd shows. Dining in a restaurant with HIV-infected patrons two tables over won’t give anyone HIV, so in Monica Gandhi’s reasoning, dining in a restaurant with symptomatic COVID infectees and an air conditioner blowing the aerosols under your own nose is safe?
Jul 01 [Misinformation: ] Monica Gandhi: COVID-19 broke our public health model. Remembering the lessons of HIV can repair it (San Francisco Chronicle) - “When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, my HIV patients had already taught me everything I needed to know to save lives and reduce harm in the face of the virus:…” “With COVID-19, I fully expected the nation’s public health officials to similarly model their efforts after what we had learned from HIV, by doing everything we could to control the spread of this pathogen, but also to take real-world conditions into account to minimize the harm caused by our interventions. To my surprise, many did not.”
DEBUNK: Another signature pattern is Monica Gandhi admonishes her colleagues for “shaming and blaming the public” without giving concrete examples of how they shamed and blamed the public. She shames and blames her colleagues, all of them, in sweeping generalizations.
PREBUNK: Monica Gandhi doesn’t want to look forward on the pandemic, but she refuses to look back on her misinformation-spreading.
Jul 13 Ask An Expert Segment (KCBS 106.9 FM San Francisco) - The hosts interview Monica Gandhi, who says no schools should have closed in the United States, in India, in Bangladesh, in Pakistan, in the Philippines, in Brazil. A host says “you really ruffled some feathers during COVID.”
DEBUNK2: If Monica Gandhi wanted schools to open sooner (she says now schools should never have closed) she could have touted air filters or outdoor classrooms or indoor masking as solutions that would pave the way to open schools. Instead, she discouraged masks because masks would “decrease confidence in vaccines” even though masks, technically, decrease transmission of virus (she didn’t trust the public to hold two facts in their minds at once.) She also discouraged vaccines for teens when they initially became available, and she discouraged vaccines for children 11-and-under as “not fully tested” when they initially became available, as this clip library shows (above.) Monica Gandhi quite likely extended school closures with this mixed messaging and this discouragement of vaccine and mask solutions that could have safely opened the schools sooner. She also erases the painful experience of select parents who did lose children to COVID and the painful experiences of children who brought the virus home from school, infecting and even killing their caregivers.
For how to manage COVID now, she mentions nothing about air filters. She strictly recommends pharma-only interventions: vaccines and therapeutics.
Fall 2023
Dr. Monica Gandhi drew me in at first. So I can see how the busy executives at Mayo Clinic Press greenlit her book which she titled “Endemic”.
But over time it became clear she moves, speaks and writes with what can only be called an “aesthetic of credibility”. An aesthetic that’s *not* paired with meritocratic ethos of credibility. In the world of economics, a famous essay about speaking and writing in a “mathy” way that only sounds mathematical is a tactic that clouds truth instead of revealing it. Dr. Monica Gandhi, when she’s off the clock, has mastered the art of writing “sciencey” text.
Now she’s being so willful in evangelizing her mis-framing of the COVID-19 pandemic — trying to make it “endemic” — she’s dancing into defamation of World Health Organization authorities and violating interference with public health laws.
This is an incredibly finicky pandemic. Just because SARS-CoV-2 will still be with us for a while doesn’t make it as benign a health threat as modern influenza.
May 2015 Mathiness in the Theory of Economic Growth (American Economic Review) - “Politics does not lead to a broadly shared consensus. It has to yield a decision whether or not a consensus prevails. As a result, political institutions create incentives for participants to exaggerate disagreements between factions. Words that are evocative and ambiguous better serve factional interests than words that are analytical and precise. Science is a process that does lead to a broadly shared consensus. It is arguably the only social process that does…“
Aug 23 Maria Van Kerkhove: Now is not the time to let our guard down with Covid-19 (Geneva Solutions) - Geneva Solutions asked “Does the announcement of the end of the pandemic this spring explain this relaxation?” W.H.O.’s Maria Van Kerfhove responded “We never said the pandemic was over but we did end the Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). We are still in a pandemic situation.”
Aug 30 Disinformation from Monica Gandhi (Twitter.com/MonicaGandhi9) - TracingCOVID says: this artifact gets the deliberate “Disinformation” score since Dr. Gandhi is currently promoting her book titled “Endemic”. Whether half-conscious or fully conscious of this error, Gandhi is miscommunicating – not just misinterpreting – directives from the W.H.O. in a way that serves her financial interests. “ENDEMIC: Interesting to see both of these trend simultaneously. Both true- COVID will never be over (even when@WHO downgraded it from pandemic to endemic) because doesn't have features of eradicability; many have gone back to normal life, incorporating COVID into other risks & wanting joy; we have tools”
Apr 02 2020 What’s the difference between a pandemic, an epidemic, endemic, and an (Intermountain Health) - “Let’s start with basic definitions: AN EPIDEMIC is a disease that affects a large number of people within a community, population, or region. A PANDEMIC is an epidemic that’s spread over multiple countries or continents. ENDEMIC is something that belongs to a particular people or country. AN OUTBREAK is a greater-than-anticipated increase in the number of endemic cases. It can also be a single case in a new area. If it’s not quickly controlled, an outbreak can become an epidemic.”
Sep 13 'Covid is not done with us': Coronavirus and the ongoing impact on immunity (RNZ Radio New Zealand) - Northland emergency doctor Gary Payinda said “‘We're now seeing your typical regular healthy middle-aged person presenting to ED with bad cases of RSV. And that's pretty novel for us’” "Post polio syndromes were not identified for literally decades after polio infections. The same with the 1918 flu epidemic - people born during the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic had a two- to three-fold increased risk of later developing Parkinson's Disease."
****Change Log:
Posted 2023-09-29: 2023 Fall update added.
Posted 2022-07-14: 2023 Spring update added.
Posted 2022-12-13: 2022 Winter update added.
2022-06-17 Spring 2022 and Summer 2022 updates added.
Posted 2022-05-15: A month after this report published, on Feb. 4, MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan questioned Dr. Gandhi on his show about her repeated incorrect forecasts. This is the segment:
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