Safety for me, but not for thee: CHOP’s Dr. David Rubin
One of many self-absorbed limelight pediatricians in the pandemic.
David Rubin is the director at PolicyLab at CHOP (Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia). He specializes in high-risk children. He was a lead investigator on CHOP’s PolicyLab’s COVID-19 forecasting model but he gave up tracking test positivity and transmission in February 2022 and it seems like he just decided he was done bothering with the pandemic.
Around the same time PolicyLab started putting out anti-mitigation statements reminiscent of the ideology of the Great Barrington Declaration. Invoking, for example, the idea of “focused protection” for high risk individuals — those people can alter their routines, but the medical professionals responsible for their care, and others, should not have to — because there’s room at the hospital, after all, for those poor high risk kids who will wind up there when they get covid.
Their message was that spreading disease in schools is fine because there’s room at the hospital.
Seemingly unaware (or uncaring) that people don’t want to get sick and need the hospital! We certainly don’t want kids hospitalized with covid — at least we shouldn’t!
At that same time in spring 2022 I heard that CHOP itself, the hospital, was still recommending quarantines and precautions while CHOP PolicyLab was tweeting out against precautions.
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Covid-19 Resource — Guidance for In-person Education in K-12 Educational Settings — January 2022 Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and PolicyLab at CHOP support in-person education, even in times of significant community transmission
Doctor David Rubin himself directly contradicted the PolicyLab official public stance of promoting children spreading the virus in crowded classrooms while cases are high, when speaking of how he would behave to protect himself from crowded indoor situations — he would avoid such situations, he said.
“I don’t think right now I would walk into a crowded venue of the week that we were at 20% of individuals who are infected with COVID.”
Clueless self-absorption unfortunately seems to be not uncommon among pediatricians. Concern limited to oneself, not one’s patients. They say well, they’re getting infectious diseases from their own (healthy) kids so they’re not worried about masking to avoid catching the virus from their (high risk) patients. No, I don’t suppose they are worried about catching illnesses from their high risk patients because their high risk patients have parents who care about them and are attempting to protect their kids from the virus because they’re most likely to be hospitalized if they do get it.
They’re ok with their own kids getting it because they think they’ll be fine — some won’t sadly, but they believe they’re superior somehow and it won’t happen to them. And they are so uncaring about spreading it to high risk kids who may not be ok.
How are doctors seemingly unaware that from the patient’s perspective, they should be wearing it for source control because they’re spreading it to vulnerable patients from their own otherwise healthy kids? Are they unaware that people aren’t generally keen on nosocomial spread?
These public displays of selfishness and lack of self-awareness are breathtaking and heartbreaking.
Why do doctors make cruel unthinking decisions about the safety of their patients in regards to infectious disease and then parade that disregard in public? I don’t have a satisfactory theory on that. But if you’re wondering how accomplished MDs, some with a Master of Science in Clinical Epidemiology degree, can seem so clueless — consider that intelligence is a squishy concept, and definitely is not the same thing as critical thinking.
University of Waterloo psychologist Igor Grossmann and his colleagues argue that most intelligence tests fail to capture real-world decision-making and our ability to interact well with others. This is, in other words, perhaps why “smart” people do “dumb” things.The ability to think critically, on the other hand, has been associated with wellness and longevity. Though often confused with intelligence, critical thinking is not intelligence. Critical thinking is a collection of cognitive skills that allow us to think rationally in a goal-orientated fashion and a disposition to use those skills when appropriate. Critical thinkers are amiable skeptics. They are flexible thinkers who require evidence to support their beliefs and recognize fallacious attempts to persuade them. Critical thinking means overcoming all kinds of cognitive biases (for instance, hindsight bias or confirmation bias). Critical thinking predicts a wide range of life events. In a series of studies, conducted in the U.S. and abroad, my colleagues and I have found that critical thinkers experience fewer bad things in life.
Doctors are humans. Just wish more of them would be better humans.
Because in a pandemic, we need more humane doctors, less careless people, and way fewer greedy hospital bean counters.
