Don't take public health prescriptions from repeatedly wrong Doctor Monica Gandhi.
The failed politics of "centrist" corrupt clientelism has infiltrated and corrupted public health and we need to put a stop to this nonsense all around.
There is an audio recording podcast recording (with transcript and references) that mirrors this post.
Now is the time to make your voice heard about vaccines.
Request for Written Comments—2025–2026 Formula for COVID–19 Vaccines for Use in the United States: https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/FDA-2025-N-1146-0001 The meeting is scheduled for May 22, 2025, 830am-430pm US Eastern.
Instructions and talking points can be found here: Urgent Action for Updated COVID Vaccines for Fall 2025 - Kaitlin Sundling - May 09, 2025
My public comment to FDA VRBPAC:
We need the covid vaccines to continue to be updated at least yearly to keep up with strains just as with flu. And these vaccines need universal recommendations, and ought not be restricted, because you wouldn’t do that with washing hands, you wouldn’t only wash your hands after the toilet based on age and health status.
Feel free to copy from me, or take a look at tips from Dr. Kaitlin Sundling.
Public health campaigns also won't work well on risk-based focus-group consultancy clientelism.
For what seems like years now people on the broad left have been pummeled with absolutely ridiculous political strategy PR to… I can only assume confuse us to where we are convinced to do nothing.1 An example is opinion writer in the Poconos telling us to just relax and trust the MAGA giving us covid to go along to get along with covid denying Trumpers,2 and then to an accelerationist political strategist from a bygone era telling democrats to lie down and play dead and let the apocalypse come and take care of things.3 Among other nonsensical do-nothing strategies4 or encouraging people think there's some saviour behind the scenes that’ll fix everything.5
But bringing that failed political strategy to public health is a bridge too far.
In an era when we have an renowned, prolific, and horrific fringe anti-vax advocate in charge of the governance over vaccines,6 there are two doctors who want to seem like they're trying to split the difference between what should be a robust and protective public health plan that saves lives and a dark and gloomy world of rampant disease spread with eugenics schemes. And no, I don't want to go halfway to hell.
Covid contrarians Shira Doron and Monica Gandhi were given a platform in a popular medical media outlet to reinvent what public health actually means, by suggesting that discouraging vaccination is actually the way to gain public confidence.7 What? This is rubbish. They can seriously just put this idea where the sun don't shine.
(Please don’t go clicking on this article — it’s misinformation. It’s a nonsensical op-ed, not based in known public health or medical science, nor marketing principles. But also, I need to tell you about these authors and then you probably won’t want anything to do with them anyway.)
(That would be 4 minutes you’d never get back.)
Don’t wait for everybody before speaking up. Chloe Humbert Aug 08, 2023 The polio campaign in the U.S. was successful because of a concerted effort to do a door to door campaign that started before the vaccine was even available. The idea that vaccination was just a default and that everyone easily got on board back then is nostalgic fantasy, it took some work by some people to make that happen. The propaganda resisting public health was as toxic and bonkers as what spreads perhaps just more prolifically today on social media. Back then some even blamed paralysis from polio on Americans who made inferior dietary choices. Sound familiar? Some people made sure we countered that and had a proper vaccine drive. There was indeed resistance to the polio elimination campaign, and it was overcome.
We've always known that what gets people to take vaccines is having vaccine campaigns where the shitty risks of the disease are explained and the benefits of vaccination are promoted, advertised, and often compelled in outbreaks and adviced or required high risk settings like for people who work in healthcare8 or live in congregate settings. Just like mosquito nets are required where malaria is endemic.9 This has always been the case. It's never been an easy lift, but this is what saves lives and keeps people safe from serious illness. The idea that discouraging vaccination would improve uptake or change public sentiment is so obviously false to anyone who stops for one second to think about why companies spend so much money on PR and advertising.10
So in June, I will be submitting public comment as I usually do,11 and I will encouarge universal vaccine recommendations with an actual vaccine campaign, and I will complain about going backwards, even though I knew it would happen and said so.12
Public health authorities shouldn’t make recommendations for vaccines in a way that would be like calculating whether or not you should wash your hands after a shitting in a public lavatory based on age or health status.
Just wash your hands and get vaccinated for pity’s sake.
About those authors pushing anti-vax lite…
Monica Gandhi has been making a fool of herself and discouraging vaccination from early on. She made an argument that people shouldn’t get a booster in America because the vaccine wasn’t available to everyone in the world yet13 even though getting boosted was obviously going to help, and not getting boosted wasn’t ever going to mean those doses would get to the global south. It was so obviously the type of climate contrarian woke-washing14 from climate deniers who claim if you advocate for any mitigation of climate change you're the bad guy against someone in the global south who needs fossil fuels. It doesn’t make any sense.15
Monica Gandhi celebrated the end of the pandemic in the first half of 2021 by having a ridiculous ribbon cutting ceremony16 where she jumped up and down and cut up a ribbon made of medical masks with a giant scissors.17
And this celebration took place while people in India were being wrecked by the Delta wave18 after she’d claimed that India was already over it and immune, one of Monica Gandhi’s many wrong predictions.19
And this was also before the Omicron wave which was both huge and sickened a lot of Americans, and was the deadliest wave for cancer patients.20 Monica Gandhi appeared with all the other anti-vax and covid contrarian personalities at the Stanford Symposium in fall of 202421 which appeared to be exactly like some kind of audition pageant for Trump regime appointments, a who’s who of right-wing covid denial and people who oppose public health.
Shira Doron co-authored a nonsensical anti-mask journal article with Erica Shenoy and others, promoting illogical, ableist, and racist ideas about how to treat patients. The paper suggested that doctors shouldn't mask, and should give all their patients covid and whatever else is circulating, just so that their deaf and hard of hearing patients could lip read - even though lip reading only has a 30% to 40% accuracy rate,22 and deaf and hard of hearing people have explained themselves again and again why ASL interpreters are needed, and why lip reading can't cut it,23 and closed captions isn't really as good either.24 So this is also just obvious woke-washing, that is like the climate denial PR people who claim if you advocate for any mitigation of climate change you're the bad guy against someone in the global south who needs fossil fuels – it's misdirection.25 And what really gives it all away is not just that the medical journal article, by Shira Doron et al, seemed focused on the economics of global supply chains being in good enough shape.26 But also that the argument about lip reading was even extended to say that people need to read facial expressions of their doctors when they don't know English. What doctor or anyone else with any sense at all would suggest that people who can't speak English should get information from their doctor via facial expression? It's astounding to me that there wasn't more ridicule made of that bit of shit at the time. It’s shocking it got published. It seemed to serve as just an article to drive submitted critical comments.27 But I guess some people making decisions on what to publish just wanted to go along with compounded mistreatment of non-English speaking patients by denying them language services and infectious disease protection, just so some anti-mask doctors could ditch their respirators in healthcare settings.
Quite frankly this should shock the conscience.
References
Psychology Today: Giving Up: Informational Learned Helplessness. It's exhausting when it’s hard to figure out what is true and what is false. By Susan A. Nolan, Ph.D., and Michael Kimball, Reviewed by Jessica Schrader Posted December 23, 2021 Learned helplessness can explain why some people become depressed; when we don’t perceive we have an effect on our own lives, we can give up. Informational learned helplessness expands this concept to our online lives, explaining why we may become overwhelmed by a quest for truth. Better practices by media organizations might make it easier for us to discern truth from fiction and reduce our cognitive exhaustion.
Risk-Based Vaccination Strategies Can Build Back Public Trust — CDC's advisory committee will vote on the updated COVID vaccine guidelines in June by Shira Doron, MD, MS, and Monica Gandhi, MD, MPH April 22, 2025
American Nurses Association - Vaccines/Nurses Practice & Advocacy Nurses give a lot of vaccines. But they also need vaccines! By the nature of their work, nurses come into contact with many infectious diseases, the most notable of which is influenza. Vaccination is an important way to stay protected from contracting a disease at work.
IAMAT - Foundation for the Support of International Medical Training (FSIMT) - How to choose a good mosquito net - Last reviewed and updated: December 11, 2020. Remember that in malarious areas, insecticide-treated mosquito nets are required in bedrooms without tightly-fitting window screens or broken screens
Democracy Now - Vaccine Inequity: Meet the Doctor Refusing a Booster as Rich Nations Get 16x More Doses Than Poor October 28, 2021 Infectious disease expert Dr. Monica Gandhi says she will not receive a booster as a healthcare worker because of the global vaccine inequity, and argues the push for boosters “detracts from the fact that we in no way have fulfilled a moral and ethical obligation to the world.”
DENY, DECEIVE, DELAY Exposing New Trends in Climate Mis- and Disinformation at COP27 (Vol 2) Climate Action Against Disinformation, January 2023 Shellenberger was active in so-called ‘woke-washing’ discourse that attacked Western Elites for withholding fossil fuels from the Global South and/ or framed Net Zero targets as a form of colonialism that contravene the global human rights agenda. Shellenberger is symbolic of the growing overlap between climate scepticism and wider culture wars, ‘anti-woke’ or so-called ‘intellectual dark web’ content. In previous years, his public persona and outputs were primarily associated with the environment, but he now posts just as regularly on issues such as migration, homelessness, gender identity or Democratic policy agendas. During COP, this included the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband and the collapse of crypto-currency platform FTX
Twitter post by Neil R. Powe @Neil_R_Powe 6:49 PM · Jun 16, 2021 San Mateo County celebrates Dr. Monica Gandhi Day! We are thrilled to see our UCSF Professor of Medicine and ZSFG expert in infectious disease honored. She has helped to guide us all through the pandemic with science and wisdom! Monica Gandhi MD, MPH and 2 other
Mehdi Hasan Questions Doctor On Covid Predictions | The Mehdi Hasan Show - MSNBC Feb 4, 2022 Mehdi interviews Dr. Monica Gandhi about her claims about the pandemic and ending restrictions early.
Axois - Aug 31, 2023 - Health - Omicron was the deadliest pandemic wave for cancer patients Mortality for cancer patients overall was 4% higher during the winter Omicron surge that peaked in January 2022 compared with when the original, or wild type, lineage of the virus was peaking in January 2021.
National Deaf Children's Society - Lip-reading - Last reviewed: 11 June 2024 Lip-reading on its own isn’t enough. It's estimated that only 30% to 40% of speech sounds can be lip-read even under the best conditions. A deaf person will usually need extra information to understand what’s being said.
Erica S. Shenoy, Hilary M. Babcock, Karen B. Brust, et al. Universal Masking in Health Care Settings: A Pandemic Strategy Whose Time Has Come and Gone, For Now. Ann Intern Med.2023;176:859-861. [Epub 18 April 2023]. doi:10.7326/M23-0793 Figure. Key milestones and contextual factors during the pandemic to endemic phases. Phase 3 Supply chain improvements.
Annals of Internal Medicine - Ideas and Opinions - 18 April 2023 - COMMENTS SECTION Lara Z. Jirmanus, Eiryn Griest Schwartzmann, JD Davids, Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Colin Killick "Health Facilities Must Ensure the Safety of All, Especially the Most Vulnerable A fundamental responsibility of health facilities is to ensure the safety of all patients and employees."