HJNO Nov/Dec 2024

POLITICIZATION OF COVID 20 NOV / DEC 2024 I  HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF NEW ORLEANS misinformation and disinformation. Report of the FSMB Ethics and Professional Com- mittee adopted by the FSMB Board, House of Delegates, April 2022, and reportedly this was disseminated to the physician commu- nity. Are you familiar with this? Abraham I’m not. I may have gotten it, and forgotten about it, probably threw it in the trash, if I did. Rep. Egan You probably did. Apparently a lot of doctors got this, and this would have con- tained a lot of the messaging relative to what the expectations from the doctors were rel- ative to face masks, social distancing, and more specifically, the efficacy of the vaccine. And there’s not just an implied threat, there’s a very direct threat in here about provid- ing any misinformation, which I would have construed as anything negative about the vaccine was a direct threat to the physician. And I would hope that we would enter this document into the record as well, because I think it underpins a lot of what actually happened throughout the… so if you’re not if you’re not familiar with that letter, I trust you are familiar with the FSMB. Abraham [Nods his head in agreement.] Rep. Egan OK, so you did not get the letter. Purportedly it went through a lot of doctors, and a lot of doctors actually read it, took it seriously, and that underlaid their response to their treatment of the condition. What I wanted to ask you, is it common for the FSMB to issue an advisory such as this? Is this standard? Abraham Rep. Egan, I have never gotten any other letters from them, so that would indi- cate that they were riding herd, so to speak, on physicians on other issues other than COVID. Rep. Egan OK. And that would certainly be our interpretation of this as well. And lastly is do you know who funds the FSMB, who provides their sustenance. on that more. The sooner that happens, the sooner you could deidentify, open-source that let everybody study it however they want to. And if there’s legislation that could help with that, I think we could talk about that in the next session because I do think it’d be useful. Rep. Gallé I’d like to enter something into the record, and this is certainly not to second guess, you Doctor Abraham, you are cor- rect, we do have the Right To Try Law, but it’s exclusionary to terminal patients only. Senior Legislative Assistant Drew Murray here is letting me know that it was passed in 2014, and it’s codified as RS40:1169.1. Rep. Peter F. Egan, Sr. I am going to ask you to comment on this: [I was told] many times, the messaging to doctors relative to the treatment of COVID patients was: when they present, don’t treat the patient, send them home, tell them to isolate, and when they turn blue, then go to the hospital… Abraham …And then they die. Rep. Egan …and then they die. And that now was said by many people originally, some version of that, put another way, doctors were discouraged from actually providing treatment to COVID patients. And second- ary to that, then they were told to send them to the hospital. And my question to you is, was there a deliberate effort made to trans- fer the treatment of the COVID patient from the physician to the hospital? Abraham I think yes, in some aspects, and in some aspects maybe not. But I think that would be almost on a case-by-case basis as to where that particular hospital was getting their marching orders from, so I do think some of that happened to a point. Rep. Egan : This letter, I don’t know if you can see this letter, it’s from the FSMB, the Federation of State Medical Boards. Pro- fessional expectations regarding medical to these early vaccines and these autisms. I want my children to make decisions about my grandchildren that are safe. And we need that study. I have met Dr. Coleman at a fundraiser one time and I’ve known you, and we trust y’all to make those decisions. And that would be huge confidence build- ers in building up the confidence when it comes to these vaccines. We’ve even been told several times that most pediatricians, if you choose not to vaccinate your child, they will not see your child anymore. I know several people that choose to do that, that don’t have pediatricians, and the reason we’re given is because they’re financially incentivized to have a certain percentage of their patients vaccinated. I don’t know if that’s right or wrong. Unless you want to add something. I’m not looking for you to add anything. Coleman As far as the data goes, for some reason, and I’m new to this game, Medic- aid data is held close by all states and they don’t release it. And I’m not sure why it’s not just open sourced – deidentified to be HIPAAcompliant, and say anybody can ana- lyze it. Analyzing it is like a pretty heavy lift, you need a biostatistician, maybe a team of them, to deal with data like that. And of course, you could probably construct a study to reach whatever conclusion you want to reach. So, if you do the study in house, you’ve got the risk of someone say- ing, well, the results are false because of this, that, and the other thing. I think that the way to solve that problem and that’s a less heavy lift on the part of the department, is just open source the data and let everybody analyze it, publish in scientific journals on it, and let the chips fall where they may. Let the debate happen. I think that’s probably the way to get to the truth of just about every matter you could come up with, because we do have a good bit of data. The problem is it’s an old software. It’s scattered out in dif- ferent places, and there is a move now to get it localized on a central database. I think Deputy Secretary Pete Krugen can elaborate