Better in their words…

Like millions of Americans, I watched the presidential debate this week. I discussed it privately with friends, but refrained from public comment. Why? For two reasons.

One, I don’t think I have anything particularly unique to say that wasn’t said by dozens of others. Two, I think doctors should try to be less overtly partisan. After all, every doctor has to take care of patients who vote for both parties.

But everyone who reads my columns knows that I hate, above all else, hypocrisy and stupidity. I particularly dislike these traits when they used by smart people in a nakedly partisan fashion. So I’m going to highlight two comments about the debate. One by a professor at Harvard who is an expert in causal inference, and the other by a cardiologist at Yale who is the editor of a major journal. Then I am going to show how their partisan bias affected their pandemic views.

Both of these comments are disconnected from reality. And both people would be saying exactly the opposite had they been discussing their political opponent and not their political ally.

First, Miguel Hernan from Harvard, claims that Biden was just stuttering!

So Biden has a stutter that, his own aides tell Axios, is worse outside the hours of 10 to 4 pm. And the stutter wasn’t like this in his 50s and 60, but has gotten a lot worse in his late 70s and into his early 80s. Hmmm amazing.

Imagine if I send in a medical student to examine a confused elderly man who is losing his train of thought repeatedly, and more often than he did a year ago, and they came out and said, “I think it is a stutter.” That student would not get a good grade.

Now see this explanation by Harlan Krumholz at Yale.

Cold medications? Are you serious? Cold medication side effects that repeatedly occur at public events and late night speeches, and have gotten worse in recent years. Side effects that mean he works best from 10-4, but not hours outside this, as reported by Axios.

Obviously, these comments are so delusional that they represent wishful thinking driven partisan bias. Had Trump exhibited anything remotely similar to Mr. Biden, the same commenters would be writing op-eds about the wonders of donanemab, or phoning in levodopa to Walgreens. They would be calling for him to undergo cognitive testing, drop out, and more.

When Trump had COVID, some doctors claimed we should use the 25th amendment to remove him. Trump famously debated while having COVID19(with the severity of illness seen in 2020— not the cold like virus we have now in 2024), yet that performance was nothing like this weeks.

Intense partisan bias affected these professors’ decision making during COVID19. Miguel Hernan, who believes Biden has a stutter, supported double masking outside, a ludicrous idea.

Harlan said this during the fall of 2020, when most of Western Europe had reopened schools. DeSantis had reopened, and we desperately fought to reopen schools in SF, LA and more liberal enclaves. Studies from Germany had shown that school reopening does not drive community spread.

Partisan bias leads to blind spots that can lead people to support outdoor cloth masking, or oppose school reopening. Millions of kids suffered from the latter bias, and many people looked like fools from the former bias. Partisan bias can get smart people to think Biden was stuttering or that he just took too much tylenol PM. PS, this is another obvious rebuttal

Doctors would be better of reflecting on how many of their views are potentially driven by partisan bias. As with schools, we see how harmful it can be.