Erica Shenoy can “read my lips” — I don’t want to risk my health & family to see her face unmasked in person

Chloe Humbert
7 min readApr 24, 2023

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This is a doctor who wants to make infection control decisions for people at a hospital based on, as best as I can figure out, wanting to gaze at herself in the mirror at the hospital unhindered by a mask.

If Shenoy is seriously so concerned about some portion of patients who need to lip-read, or who she thinks want to see her lips, she can certainly afford a nice PAPR unit. There are also masks with a window. You don’t have to unmask and spread viruses to patients. So that line of argument is pure nonsense.

Do you want an anti-masker in charge of infection control at the hospital? I don’t want someone opposed to infection control measures making healthcare decisions for me. And I don’t want a hapless doctor deciding on what I should prioritize in my life and my health.

I’d like to prioritize spending time with my husband. Painting. Kayaking. Hiking. Some of us have to work. Some of us are in school. Some of us need to cook our own dinner and do our own laundry. Some of us have children. Or cats. Or dogs to take to the park. We have lives to live. And if we get covid and are out of commission for days, weeks, maybe months, possibly years, or especially if we get long-covid like Physics Girl is enduringall the things we value in our lives — all our connections — will be in jeopardy. Some of us even die from the first covid infection, never mind the second.

But for some bonkers reason, self-absorbed Erica Shenoy thinks I should prioritize seeing her face, unmasked. Risk giving up everything, just to gaze at her mug? Who does she think she is?

I’m not feeling isolated, Erica. I don’t pine longingly to see my doctor’s lips because I’m not a weirdo. I have my own family and so does my doctor. I have neighbors and friends and hobbies, and a life to live. And I’d like to continue with all that by avoiding viruses disrupting my life on top of whatever else I need to see the doctor about. My doctor and I don’t need to stare at each other’s unmasked faces in the exam room. I go there for healthcare.

And most of us certainly don’t want to get covid if already in a state to need the hospital. It’s obviously bad to add covid on top of another condition — you’d think a doctor would know about comorbidities, or has heard of the often repeated “underlying conditions” reference, or as the CDC describes it, People with Certain Medical Conditions who are at higher risk of covid complications.

It’s also not good to combine covid with surgery. That’s why pre-procedure testing has been standard. A doctor with the purview of infectious disease should be aware of the dangers of surgery with covid.

But I’ve heard rumours of hospital administrators, including those in infection control, pushing to end pre-surgery testing because the hospital is not happy with having to cancel procedures. Apparently they want to push through more lucrative procedures uninterrupted, even if it harms patients by risking their ability to recover from covid and or the surgery. Perhaps they are motivated to get the profitable procedures through the assembly line before the patient takes a turn and dies from covid and they never get the chance. The ghoulishness of the American money-making healthcare system makes the idea of this kind of end-stage rent-seeking easily within fathomable speculation.

I wonder if Erica Shenoy is also against pre-procedure testing. I haven’t seen a public statement on that… yet.

Erica Shennoy’s article in the Annals of Internal Medicine also has this weird graphic that is supposed to demonstrate some process to “endemic” covid where infection control is just abandoned because the supply chain situation is… good enough. Her upside down bizarro world scheme involves unmasking in healthcare, of course. But what other infection control measures does she want abandoned? Is unmasking in the operating room on her agenda? C.difficile is endemic in many nursing homes and hospitals, so does Erica Shenoy think we should just reuse bedpans without disinfecting them? Is her next planned article about how healthcare workers should stop hand washing because c.diff and flu are here to stay? This is well within reasonable speculation since there was recently a surgeon testifying in the U.S. Congress pooh-poohing hand washing. You really can’t make this stuff up. Even ChatGPT would have trouble “hallucinating” some of the stuff these anti public health doctors are willing to say in public.

It’s shocking that someone who’s supposed to be knowledgeable about infectious disease wouldn’t understand that endemic disease pretty much means PERMANENT infection controls. Where malaria is endemic, they don’t stop using mosquito nets — the use of mosquito nets is standard — and sometimes mandated in hotels in malaria endemic regions. Where covid is permanently in circulation, masks should then be perpetually mandated in high risk settings and essential services. If you want to get rid of disease control — get rid of the disease. Until that happens, you need to at least use infection control measures. The Associate Chief of the Infection Control Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital should surely know such basic infectious disease protocol. Why doesn’t she?

Elimination is one goal that we could have. We did eliminate malaria in the United States. Now, unfortunately mosquito borne illnesses are again a potential, since West Nile Virus was found in mosquitos in the city limits in Scranton Pennsylvania and the news said, “Residents in the community are advised to take precautions when outdoors.”

We’ve had some pretty plentiful mosquitos here the past few years, so I have a mosquito net over the garden swing in my backyard during summers. Several of my neighbors have invested in netted patio gazebo tents and screened in porches. I’d sure like it if my local officials did something about the mosquito problem, and in fact I have written letters to my local elected officials about this. But people don’t just say ok the mosquitos are here, just get eaten alive this evening, maybe risk febrile fever, or even encephalitis. No, of course not. We take precautions.

But Erica Shenoy doesn’t reason that out logically for some reason. Why is that?

Is Erica Shenoy part of some PR scheme? As a management level employee of a major hospital, she seems to have a conflict of interest in speaking about public health in the public interest, if she is, in essence, representing an institution. So I have to ask — is she representing a hospital?

We know from big tobacco history that doctors are definitely not above taking part in PR campaigns to spread disinformation. There always seems to be a doctor available to speak out in favour of — well, historically — just about anything. And the tobacco playbook was about flooding the zone, pushing for overly complicated or watered down rules or slowing government regulation and clouding the issue with confusion and conflicts of interest, to manufacture doubt which create informational learned helplessness in the public. And now it seems we’re being demoralized with regards to a global pandemic, something which touches us all.

Toxic Sludge is Good for You (2002) — Currently according to some estimates, more than 50% of what we think is news is actually instigated by the public relations industry. PR professionals measure their success in terms of how well they can insert their clients’ messages into the continuous flow of news and information while their own activities remain out of view.

And this is why a large amount of the media consumed contains industry favouring propaganda.

Brandt AM. Inventing conflicts of interest: a history of tobacco industry tactics. Am J Public Health. 2012 Jan;102(1):63–71. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2011.300292. Epub 2011 Nov 28. PMID: 22095331; PMCID: PMC3490543. The industry campaign worked to create a scientific controversy through a program that depended on the creation of industry–academic conflicts of interest. This strategy of producing scientific uncertainty undercut public health efforts and regulatory interventions designed to reduce the harms of smoking. A number of industries have subsequently followed this approach to disrupting normative science. Claims of scientific uncertainty and lack of proof also lead to the assertion of individual responsibility for industrially produced health risks.

There is lots of money behind opposing all public health measures, and especially the kind that might “remind people” of the danger in ways that could impact sales and the desire to commute and travel, or go on cruises. I worry that the anti-vaccine movement has so much money behind it that they are moving toward getting rid of vaccines altogether — they’ve already moved toward less vaccines— because after all they may argue even offering vaccines might remind someone the virus still exists and cause some to pause before going to a huge conference.

But perhaps Shenoy is just looking to climb up in the corporate hospital ecosystem. Maybe Erica Shenoy has “internalized the values” of the corporate hospital ecosystem.

“Most people, I imagine, simply internalize the values. That’s the easiest way and the most successful way. You just internalize the values and then you regard yourself, in a way correctly, as acting perfectly freely.”

Noam Chomsky (Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media)

Or could Shenoy be a clueless propagandized victim? A self-absorbed doctor who just doesn’t understand infectious disease and, in an objectively sexist societal landscape, secretly worries that her best asset is her smile — and that’s why she’s so concerned about having to mask it up in her workplace the rest of her career. What a tragic figure if that’s the case, and a truly sad commentary on our times.

The truth is though, I don’t know what Erica Shenoy’s deal is — but whatever it is, she doesn’t make logical sense. And if something doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t make sense to listen to it. Plenty of smart people say foolish stuff because intelligence is no guarantee that someone is engaging in critical thinking. And so many of us, even doctors, spend most of our lives on autopilot — or what Daniel Kahneman called “System 1” thinking — System 2 being critical thinking, which seems often in short supply.

Critically thinking about this, it’s pretty obvious that if a danger continues to exist in a medical setting, you continue the mitigation measures for that danger. And Erica Shenoy should know that.

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