Fragile bosses push RTO - 11 July 2026
Bob Wachter’s AI hype grand rounds.
Bob Wachter boosting AI hype and the AI bubble via promoting it for healthcare was so not surprising. In light of a new op-ed in The Nation bashing Bob Wachter over his NYTimes piece promoting AI back in January, here’s what I wrote at the time.
In January, for instance, The New York Times ran an op-ed with the headline “Stop Worrying, and Let AI Save Your Life.” The author, Dr. Bob Wachter, is the chair of the department of medicine at the University of California–San Francisco medical school and a proponent of AI’s use in healthcare. In the piece, Wachter touted AI as a way to fix the expensive inefficiencies of the American medical system, which he described as “in desperate need of transformation.” He will not be the last person to make such arguments.
As doctors who care for many people from marginalized communities, we find it difficult to be so bullish on AI—and not just because the quality and safety of AI technology is nowhere near guaranteed. We are worried that magical thinking about AI as a path toward real ‘transformation’ in healthcare, as Dr. Wachter suggests, will distract us from the current economic crisis that is crushing our patients. Far from its being a new chapter in how we deliver care, we fear that healthcare will become even more financialized as our systems become more deeply entangled with the AI bubble and the speculative investments that accompany it.
If you’ve paid attention to the covid minimizers you’ll be very familiar with Bob Wachter’s clownish but dangerous antics in the PR space. But if not, or if you want a walk down memory lane, my piece gives a quick summary of all the stupid things he got up to promoting covid carelessness.
And here’s an earlier essay on what I think of AI in healthcare:
Hallucinating chatbot healthcare tech tools hopped up on medical conference hype. What could possibly go wrong? AI hype is so normalized that of course tech tycoons and private equity think that healthcare should run on hype filled apps and downsizing staff. Chloe Humbert Aug 04, 2024 It was also noted that unlike IBM’s Watson which was a tool based on curated medical records, that this new AI healthcare worker replacement tool reportedly “not only pulls from published, peer-reviewed medical journals and textbooks but also will be able to integrate real-time information from global health databases, ongoing clinical trials and medical conferences.” This alone makes this AI in non-compliance with any kind of healthcare regulations anywhere. Using this software in a healthcare setting this way would be a clear cut violation of medical safety regulations of various types. It’s the very epitome of bad science, using research results or data that’s not been reproduced or maybe not even yet peer reviewed. Just chucking unverified information into the mix and using it to make life and death critical medical decisions flies in the face of medical ethics. I have a hard time understanding how a medical doctor could’ve written about this and not pointed that out.
And here’s podcast (audio with a transcript) where I tell some personal stories including a couple about AI in healthcare.
Probable AI error anecdotes. Don’t Wait For Everybody - Episode 039 Chloe Humbert May 22, 2026
One anecdote is where I was told that AI in the Epic system made up a whole doctors appointment that never happened with all the necessary summaries and documentation to have my health insurance pay the bill and I only found out because I was issued a copay and knew the visit never took place. Now imagine if erroneous or incorrect information from that had been used in medical decisions for me, because this isn’t just about the economic waste of potential mass health insurance fraud by chatbot, lives are on the line.
🗞️ In the news
The Hill - Sanders releases trove of internal HHS emails showing RFK Jr. pressured CDC over vaccine messaging Comments: by Ryan Mancini - 06/25/26 7:55 PM ET Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Thursday released a tranche of Health and Human Services (HHS) emails that appear to show HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pressuring the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) over its vaccine messaging. Emails indicate that Kennedy directed the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel to restrict access to vaccines, allowed researchers to access “confidential data” to indicate the disproven claim that vaccines cause autism and changed recommendations for the public to receive COVID-19 shots without input from the CDC. Other emails also show that Kennedy’s then-chief of staff, Matthew Buckham, emailed former CDC Director Susan Monarez in August 2025 about the need for a “political review of major decisions at CDC … to ensure that [the Immediate Office of the Secretary] and the CDC political leadership all have eyes on the decisions for approval/changes before they go into effect.” Less than a week later, Kennedy fired Monarez “for failing to rubber stamp recommendations from” the CDC’s vaccine panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, Sanders said in a statement.
Plaintiff in Children’s Health Defense Lawsuit Charged With Murder A mother who blamed vaccines for the deaths of her toddler twins and joined the anti-vax group’s lawsuit against the American Academy of Pediatrics has been charged with murdering her children. Walker Bragman Jul 03, 2026 That investigation was launched last year as foul play was suspected. Children’s Health Defense (CHD), the anti-vaccine advocacy group founded and previously led by Kennedy before he became Health and Human Services Secretary, picked up Shaw’s story and promoted it for months. Days after her children’s deaths, Shaw appeared on a CHD podcast, claiming that her husband’s side of the family all suffered allergic reactions to the flu shot that the pediatrician ignored. In the days after the vaccines, she said, her children deteriorated, prompting a hospital visit. On the eighth day, they died. Shaw later became the lead plaintiff in a racketeering lawsuit filed by the group against the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP)—while under investigation for murder.
Objections to remote work tied to bosses with fragile egos and narcissistic traits.
The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week - June 22, 2026 By Adam Grant, Marissa Shandell and Courtney Elliott - The New York Times Over the past six years, we’ve studied why some leaders continue to support remote work, while others resist it. We surveyed thousands of executives, middle managers and frontline supervisors on a host of personality traits. When we later asked them about their stances on hybrid and remote work, their answers didn’t correlate with how much they trusted their employees or how much they loved being around people. The only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism — the tendency to be self-centered and entitled. The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status — and the more they favored return-to-office mandates. That pattern held for chief executives of Fortune 500 companies.
Of course we all knew that control fixated bosses were pushing Return To Office mandates.
