COVID and The Academy: What Have We Learned? Tracy Beth Høeg, MD, Ph.D.

[Music] [Music] slides there all right well it's really an honor to be here um I'm a big fan of the work that you're doing at heterodox Academy um so um why why am I here um so first I want to say I think it's great that we're finally able to have discussions like this on the Stanford campus Because I know debate was really not encouraged during the pandemic and um I was actually just thinking this morning the last time I I think the last time I was here I was actually interviewing for um residency and we decided that we couldn't afford living here and and uh so it's It's always important to keep in mind at institutions like this that this it is a very privileged um environment and you know it's so important for academic institutions when they have so much power over the rest of the world to be open to um outside ideas and heterodox views because people you know have have various viewpoints from the different backgrounds that they have and people and academic institutions might not necessarily be representative um so I um have a MD and a PhD PhD in epidemiology and public health from the University of Copenhagen um I am also a practicing physician currently um in sports and Interventional spine medicine uh I did my uh residency at UC Davis um and was a researcher there I graduated in 2018 I did a fellowship after that at um a program uh was affiliated with UCSF um in Interventional Spine and Sports Medicine um I most recently been doing research with uh UCSF in University of Southern Denmark um and I also have a little bit of an unusual background I was a professional Runner and ran in the World Championships in 2013 and 2018 um so I I have a little bit a different view of of Health I'll get into that but so I have uh I guess now I added it up for this talk 24 uh scientific publications related to covid-19 um and I'll be talking about the some of the topics they were related to trans covid-19 Transmission in schools Youth Sports covid-19 testing and screening um how we study long covid mask Effectiveness um and uh postvaccination myocarditis and risk benefit analyses of uh the MRNA vaccines um so I listed some of the scientific journals I've been published in um and so just to take a step back I wanted us to consider what science is so Richard feineman says science is a culture of doubt I like that and science is the belief and the ignorance of experts um a more uh recent uh scientific philosopher matius Desmet says science comes from that little space that is created when you realize you don't know um so the scientific process is the opposite of advertising and you basically um you you want to provide all the information so other people can disprove you it's a very humble process um and so you want to set out thinking that you don't have the answer and and be disproven and sort of it's It's a process whereby you know you you you look to be disproven and you look to have people bring in other other things that you hadn't thought about um to get to the answer of what is true and so we can consider whether or not our response to the co pandemic was actually scientific ific um you know was it humble and open-minded or did we have certain people from on high saying follow the science and that's misinformation um so you can think about school closures natural immunity vaccine mandates lockdowns Etc um that's picture of me running sorry so uh so what is health think about what health is um so uh happiness Freedom Community interpersonal relationships good sleep lack of pain ability to exercise and move um so was our response to covid truly did we did did we prioritize Health um or was it more about fear um were medical problems delayed or missed um did we shut down outdoor spaces races Parks recess um youth sports um so I know that I was part of the reason I was invited here is because I supposedly have heterodox views but but my views are actually were actually very Orthodox um in in Denmark and I ended up getting a a lot of grief in the United States for views which were not controversial in the country that I had moved from in 2015 um and and so in Denmark and in the Scandinavian countries in eneral they prioritized reopening schools and youth sports did not Mas children um under the age of uh under the age of 12 no they did not have vaccine mandates um recommended uh so they recently they just said in the newspaper the risk of long covid is one in a thousand um in one of the Danish newspapers so a little bit different than what we're getting here in the United States um this was a picture from our TV at home actually when the day on April 18th 2020 when Denmark reopened schools after only 6 weeks of school closure so a year later the majority of schools in uh California were still remote or only had one or two days of uh hybrid learning um and so why why did it take us so long in the United States to reopen schools compared to countries we generally think of as having good and reasonable public health and science based uh policies so we already knew in June of 2020 that um that school reopening was not associated with an increased uh Community rates of covid-19 and we were seeing very low spread from children as compared to other respiratory viruses um but again it took us a long time in California and many states to reopen the schools um and the question is is why and so I was an advi I was the medical adviser at a large dases in Sacramento and we actually reopened our schools full-time in August of 2020 and we had a great experience that year and I and um and it's interesting to think about the fact that um in in January of 2021 less than 20% of the schools in California were open despite the the evidence that we had from Europe that it was safe to do so and despite what we knew about the collateral damage that was going to be coming um and I was the senior author of a study published by the CDC in their Journal um mmwr where we found um in in Wood County Wisconsin among over 5,000 students and staff over the fall semester that there are only seven cases of the total of 191 of covid-19 that were linked to in school transmission um and the case rates were lower in the schools in the community but after this um the CDC actually ended up putting out even stricter reopening guidelines requiring six feet of distance and testing um and and uh reopening metrics based on community transmission um despite what our study had found that was published in their own journal and the question was why why weren't they Consulting us uh the those of us who are doing the research um and and it wasn't just us in what from the Wood County Wisconsin stud he was also Duke researchers wondering you know why why are these uh why are their reopening guidelines so strict and it turns out it they were most likely basing their wording on requests from teachers unions um so we had to release another study explaining that uh less than 10% of our elementary students were distant 6 feet um they weren't masking indoors at lunch there were no new ventilation systems um and at that time I began speaking out more publicly with uh op-eds about the science uh supporting uh children returning back to normal life in the spring of 2021 um and I recommended the same for our dases that's not our dases but I just wanted to point out some of the ridiculous things that we were doing to Children uh to stop viral respiratory spread um and um we of course didn't ever have good evidence that masking children was going to stop the transmission of covid-19 um we have many randomized studies and now highquality observational studies some of which I've been a co-researcher on that have found the same um and I wanted to point out that Norway found the same minimal trans mission that we found in Wood County Wisconsin in a totally unmasked uh environment uh in their schools and so this is one of the studies uh that I uh published actually with van prad and uh so basically looking at the 77 studies that the CDC published uh pertain pertaining to masks from 2020 um claiming that masks were effective at reducing spread without having the evidence um to to to state as much um and so we were basically inundated by Propaganda from the CDC stating that masks were effective when we actually when the highest level evidence we have doesn't find that um the CDC also rejected a reanalysis that was uh larger and of longer duration of one of their U very short um preliminary studies that found a correlation between mask requirements and uh uh decreased spread of covid-19 among children and when we expanded the length of the study and included the entire country we uh uh the CDC mmwr uh declined to publish it um so um this is when basically I started getting in trouble at UC Davis um I was asked by senior public information officer not to mention I was an associate researcher in my interviews um I was uh I was deleted from the the department website that I was in I was a voluntary clinical professor and uh and then later an associate researcher um uh at the same time I was censored off of uh NPR All Things Considered when I said that I didn't think Ma children should wear masks uh Outdoors during Sports um and I just wanted to remind everyone here that we actually had a a a so we had a Prohibition on outdoor Youth Sports one year into the pandemic in California um these are the insane unscientific things that we were doing because debate wasn't allowed um more about censorship and I bring this up because Stanford has been highly involved in their virality project in censoring science I was censored multiple times on uh X and Facebook for basically just uh stating cdc's own data um and uh so I discuss that already and then the real controversy began when I started publishing about evidence of postvaccination myocarditis and uh this was in adolescence and um I was the first author on this study and we found a risk of postvaccination myocarditis after the second dose of the fiser vaccine of about one and 6,000 to one in 10,000 um in adolescent males and we found that the second dose was not justified when you do a risk benefit analysis um and that was just looking at the risk of myocarditis alone so I was uh so this these are some of the you know ways online in which uh I was attacked act so extreme right-winger antivaxer recipient of dark money uh of course none of this was true um and uh oh sorry I think I'm going the wrong direction uh so I was called into multiple meetings related to this study at UC Davis um and uh and they I ended up meeting with the head the head the chair of epidemiology who didn't find any issues with the study um it ended up going on to be peer-reviewed and published and then I um lost my position uh shortly thereafter and um they stated that the reason was because we had a slower than anticipated Recruitment and the trial that we were doing of um uh bone marrow aspirate concentrate for ACL tears um and of course we didn't have as many ACL tears that year because Youth Sports were shut down and very few people were skiing um so it was not unanticipated that our recruitment had slowed down um and so it wasn't just that I lost my position but the students that I was working with also lost their research project the participants in our study um we'll never get the results of that study um and uh and then I had just recently G given a lecture to students uh to the medical students at UC Davis about doing research that is Meaningful to them and that they think is going to impact uh you know their patients and their communities and then shortly thereafter they see me losing my job after speaking up the way I did and so I'm not sure if that send the right message uh to the students um so you know I mean it is what it is and I'm not angry about it but I did basically lose my position for asking the important questions and putting in the work to get the data and what UC Davis prioritized was having the right appearances at least that's how it seems to me and um so I'm still actually doing some research with UC Davis so I guess I just want to say you know these things aren't the end of the world um and people move on but it does send a bad message um to the younger people to younger researchers and um of course I was far from alone in um the types of re repercussions for doing the research asking the you know most important questions of the day um and uh you know the question is were people being ostracized for asking questions um or or or were they protected by their institutions and I certainly don't think they were protected um and so I think I hope in the future this is two people at Stanford J bachara and Scott Atlas who there were cancellation campaigns against them at Stanford um and they were really not protected by their institution and I hope in the future that we can have more of a a an atmosphere of attacking people's ideas and debate and supporting um the people that work for you so I'll end with that thanks

Channel: Heterodox Academy

Views: 2,494

Keywords: free speech, heterodoxy, higher education, diversity, viewpoint diversity, enlightenment, free thought, heterodox academy, Jonathan Haidt, steven pinker, rationality, academia, enlightenment thinkers, intellectuals, sensemaking, science, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, cornel west, douglas murray, critical race theory, crt, intellectual dark web, john stuart mill, epistemics, conservative, progressive

Id: dMFNbHbikak

Length: 16min 52sec (1012 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 19 2024