Why are epidemiologists and infectious disease doctors still so bizarrely afraid of Covid?

And why must we listen to them, or even pretend to, anymore? They don't share the same risk-reward calculus as the rest of us.

Michael Osterholm has Covid.

That’s not the interesting part.

You may remember Osterholm. If not: he’s an Minneapolis epidemiologist who is widely quoted on Covid, helped advise Joe Biden’s transition team, and runs a epidemic policy research center at the University of Minnesota. He’s a big kahuna in public health.

And when the epidemic began three years ago, Osterholm seemed briefly to be among the more rational voices. In March 2020, he wrote a prescient op-ed in the Washington Post titled “Facing Covid-19 reality: a national lockdown is no cure.”

But Osterholm did not stay calm for long. Five months later, he and another writer demanded not just that lockdowns continue but that the federal government require them nationally - and tighten them:

We should mandate sheltering in place for everyone but the truly essential workers… people must stay at home and leave only for essential reasons: food shopping and visits to doctors and pharmacies while wearing masks and washing hands frequently.

(Osterholm did not offer details the frequency of the hand-washing, or how the government would enforce it. Hygiene monitors in every bathroom? Drones? Federally paid paper towel wipers? The mind reels.)

Again, Osterholm wrote those words in August 2020, long after the worst-case scenarios of hospital overrun and Covid striking down healthy adults - much less children - had proven false.

That’s not the interesting part either, though it is the beginning of the interesting part.

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(SUBSCRIBE NOW TO FIND OUT THE INTERESTING PART, WHICH IS INTERESTING INDEED. OR WAIT 48 HOURS.)

The interesting part is this:

Last week, on the March 23 podcast where he talked about getting Covid, Osterholm also talked about the failed precautions he had taken to avoid getting Covid. To wit:

On March 10, he and his partner Fern Peterson ate at their $3.4 million apartment with a friend to celebrate Osterholm’s 70th birthday. (Yes, a $3.4 million apartment. In Minneapolis. Still not the interesting part.)

(Doin’ well by doin’ good, the public health way!)

SOURCE

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Before they met, Osterholm, Fern, and their friend all made sure they had not been exposed to anyone in the five previous days who had Covid. They checked to be sure they “had no symptoms whatsoever, not even a sniffle.” Then they each took a rapid Covid test.

On the podcast, Osterholm referred to these preparations, without apparent irony, as “the Osterholm protocol, as it's become known.”

Osterholm’s efforts to avoid getting Covid went past his eponymous protocol.

When he, his wife, and the friend left the apartment, they donned masks. Or, to be more accurate, N95 respirators. Osterholm made sure listeners knew his was “face fitted,” strapped tightly to his cheeks.

Then they went to a “venue” and:

put our N95s on before we walked in. We're there for an hour and 45 minutes in a large room with very few people. It was a small venue but yet separated. We then left the venue, took our N95s off when we actually got to the car.

Sounds like a blast! No doubt the other “patrons” at the “venue” were thrilled to see the respirator-clad threesome out for exactly 105 minutes of fun on a Friday night.

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By Sunday, though, Osterholm, Fern, and his friend were feeling sick. And by Monday, March 13, they tested positive for Covid.

Did I mention that all three were mRNA vaccinated?

And boosted.

And boosted.

And boosted.

Not a misprint. As Osterholm explained, “between the three of us, we had 15 doses of vaccine, five each.”

Which works out to five doses per infection.

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Now Osterholm is suffering. Not so much from The Covid - he complained on the podcast he felt like he’d “been hit by a train,” but his actual symptoms were sniffles and a scratchy throat - as from his feelings about The Covid:

I now understand what it feels like, where you're asking yourself, what did I do? How did I do this? What's wrong? And you didn't fail. You didn't fail then. I didn't fail. And yet I know that I feel with this virus that somehow I should have done something better, something different.

Yes, Mike, you should have done something different!

Vaccinated or not, you should have dumped the N95s and the rapid tests and the checklist and just lived your life.

To be clear. Osterholm is not at zero danger from Covid, even Omicron. He’s 70, the point when coronavirus risk for healthy adults goes from almost-too-low-to-measure-accurately to pretty-low-but-real.

Plus he’s… not svelte. (Not a value judgment! It’s a risk factor.)

But not zero is still close to zero. As nearly the entire world now understands.

The evidence that humanity is done with Covid is all around us, from airplanes full of unmasked people to China’s decision to dump lockdowns overnight to the fact that barely one out of six Americans has bothered to receive a new mRNA booster.

(How long before the Centers for Disease Control stops updating this chart? Because it’s getting embarrassing for vaccine fanatics…)

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Yet one group still loves Sars-Cov-2 even more than it loves 90-year-olds with diabetes.

And that group is Michael Osterholm and his fellow public health experts. They have proudly broadcast their insanity for three years now.

In June 2020, the New York Times polled 511 epidemiologists about what activities they thought were safe.

At the time, only 20 percent said they were willing to fly. 37 percent said they did not expect to fly for at least another year. Only 14 percent would hug or shake hands with a friend, 13 percent would go to church, and 3 percent to a sporting event.

Okay, but that was June 2020, when mass protests of tens of thousands of people were the only group activity that public experts permitted.

(A doctors’ note: For approved causes only)

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But what about after the vaccines arrived? The miraculous vaccines? Everything changed then, right?

Not exactly.

The Times conducted a follow-up survey of 723 epidemiologists in May 2021 - after most Americans at high risk, and everyone who wanted one, had already received mRNA vaccines. Recall that May 2021 was the peak of vaccine overconfidence, too. It was the month Anthony Fauci said the shots were so effective that the United States could likely “eliminate” Sars-Cov-2 as a risk.

Yet in May 2021, only 39 percent of the epidemiologists surveyed said they would hug or shake hands with friends. Only 25 percent had taken an airplane, and 15 percent gone to an gym.

That bizarre overestimation of Covid’s risks, and desperate effort to avoid catching it, continues to this day. Osterholm is far from alone among public health experts in taking precautions that are both absurd - given Omicron’s relative mildness - and useless - given its infectivity.

Seven out of eight epidemiologists the Washington Post surveyed two weeks ago said they still mask almost everywhere in public.

Three said they tried to avoid eating indoors in restaurants.

Four said they continue to test routinely for Covid before meeting friends. Dr. Rochelle Walensky - the Centers for Disease Control director - said:

I might get a text from a friend coming for coffee and she’ll send me a picture of a negative test. We don’t even have to ask.

(Eight kinds of crazee! Well, seven, plus Monica Gandhi.)

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Why? Why are epidemiologists still living like this? Why are they still so afraid?

In 2020, I assumed the fear was mostly a pose, designed to scare voters and help Biden at Donald Trump’s expense. But Trump hasn’t been president for more than two years.

At this point, at least part of the explanation appears to be psychological, not political: that some physicians and researchers are drawn to epidemiology and infectious disease work because of their particular fear of disease and epidemics. Either they want to stop these epidemics, heroically, or they want to face and manage their own fears, or both.

I am not aware of any research proving this fear (though the Times and Post surveys show that epidemiologists are badly out-of-step with both the general public and the actual risks of Covid).

But similar connections have been shown in other medical and health subspecialties.

A 2017 survey of 636 dietitians revealed that half were at risk for anorexia, and 8 percent had been treated for an eating disorder, rates far above the general public. Similarly, a 2022 survey of almost 1,700 faculty, graduate students, and others associated with clinical psychology programs found that over 80 percent had a history of mental health problems and almost half had a diagnosed mental disorder.

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Similarly, Osterholm has had what might be called a singular focus on the threat of infectious disease for a very long time. As a July 2020 profile of him explained:

Mike Osterholm has seen a darkness approaching for longer than almost anybody. In 2017, he predicted a pandemic in Deadliest Enemy. In 2005, he predicted a pandemic in Foreign Affairs. But he doesn’t take pride in any of this, nor does he think his predictions are all that bold. He doesn’t even believe that COVID will be the last pandemic in his lifetime.

And even then, he was eating his own cooking:

Mike Osterholm is taking quarantine as seriously as Minnesota’s most important epidemiologist should. He declines to do interviews in person, and he says he rarely leaves his house—he hasn’t even seen his five grandchildren in person since March 10.

And finally:

With the inherent amount of illness and death, Osterholm says we must recognize coronavirus as an attack on the very social fabric of our world.

No.

No we don’t. Because it isn’t. If anything, minor respiratory viruses are part of the social fabric of our world.

But the fear-driven responses from Osterholm and his fellow epidemiologists (not to mention the rushed mRNA shots that the government and drug companies delivered in part because of those fears) - those might be.