(The opinions expressed by contributors are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of this site.)
CNN medical analyst and Washington Post columnist Dr. Leana Wen became known during the COVID pandemic as a voice of doom and a proponent of draconian policies, once even suggesting that only the vaccinated should enjoy the freedoms of normal, pre-pandemic life. (Not surprisingly, Wen is also an abortion extremist who previously served as the head of Planned Parenthood.)
It’s a bit rich to see her now acting as if she’s just come across a new nugget of information that changes her views when many people have been censored and canceled for saying the exact same thing: namely, that COVID deaths have been dramatically overcounted.
No duh, as the kids say.
In a Friday Washington Post opinion piece, the good doctor did an about-face and, without admitting fault, completely discounted much of what she’s been peddling the last several years:
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United States is experiencing around 400 covid deaths every day. At that rate, there would be nearly 150,000 deaths a year.
But are these Americans dying from covid or with covid?
Ah, the question that so many have been asking. Many of us already knew the answer: not nearly as many as they’ve been telling us. She writes:
Two infectious-disease experts I spoke with believe that the number of deaths attributed to covid is far greater than the actual number of people dying from covid.
The fact that Dr. Wen is just coming to this realization now, nearly three years into the pandemic, is simply astonishing—and shameful. Could she not have interviewed these two experts ages ago, before she became a leading advocate of punishing the populace for not strictly adhering to COVID protocols? This is also not the first time she’s had to walk backward; she also infamously changed her position on mask mandates in December 2021, after her previous service as a mask fanatic. She continues:
Robin Dretler, an attending physician at Emory Decatur Hospital and the former president of Georgia’s chapter of Infectious Diseases Society of America, estimates that at his hospital, 90 percent of patients diagnosed with covid are actually in the hospital for some other illness. [Emphasis mine.]
“Since every hospitalized patient gets tested for covid, many are incidentally positive,” he said. A gunshot victim or someone who had a heart attack, for example, could test positive for the virus, but the infection has no bearing on why they sought medical care.
Many people come to the hospital with serious conditions, and upon admission, they are found to have COVID. But that’s not why they went to the hospital in the first place, and it’s also not the cause of their demise if they didn’t make it. Wen:
If these patients die, covid might get added to their death certificate along with the other diagnoses. But the coronavirus was not the primary contributor to their death and often played no role at all. [Emphasis mine.]
Reactions to Wen’s sudden awakening were not kind:
And:
It’s nice that Dr. Wen is belatedly waking up to reality, but the fact is she and almost the entire medical establishment and the Biden Administration misled the American people for years. I don’t see the words, “I apologize” or “I’m sorry” anywhere in her article. I know many liberals who only get their news from outlets like CNN and The Washington Post, and they had no idea that much of the information they were being fed was hot garbage.
It’s going to take a lot more than this for her to recover her shattered reputation.