It’s funny how humans will go from one extreme to another. There were reports in recent years of parents taking their children to measles– or chicken-pox “parties” so as to get the kids infected and the disease “over with.” On the other hand, there are people who believed that with Covid-19, they could somehow avoid the virus forever if they just masked and inoculated and distanced and made avoiding a specific pathogen their life’s mission. But one prominent Covid-ritualist physician might have just learned that as with a bully who’s intent on finding you, you can run, but you can’t hide.
Bob Wachter, M.D. is a bigwig at the University of California San Francisco, the chairman of the school’s Department of Medicine. So he has some influence over government policy, which he used to advocate mask and gene-modification-agent (GMA, aka “vaccine”) mandates. Unlike California pols Governor Gavin Newsom, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Representative Nancy Pelosi, and others, however, Wachter apparently practiced what he preached: He’d been masking and boosting with religious-like zeal even after most Americans had stopped worrying about Covid. The result?
Wachter just contracted the virus — and ended up in the hospital.
As CNN writes:
He said his symptoms started with a dry cough on July 9, and by that night, he had a fever, chills and a sore throat. Wachter said he made a mistake the following day when he took a shower while feeling these flu-like symptoms.
“I work (sic) up in a bloody pool on my bathroom floor,” he wrote on Twitter. “There was a dent in the lid of a trashcan, likely where my head had hit. I remembered nothing. As I managed to get up, it was clear that my face was going to need stitches, and more than a couple.”
…Wachter said he required stitches on the back of his head and on his forehead, which he shared in a photo of himself with a black eye.
The doctor has more advice for us, too: Don’t repeat his mistake of taking a hot shower when sick. He offered nothing, though, about how maybe Covid paranoia itself is a mistake. And, boy, was he ever all in (and still is).
Commentator Andrea Widburg provides, as she writes, a “timeline of Wachter’s pronouncements from 2022, when most Americans (at least, most Americans outside of California) had gone back to living a completely normal life.”
On a podcast in March 2022, the physician defended his belief that heavy-handed mask and GMA mandates were necessary “earlier in the pandemic.” He also touted the GMAs purported efficacy and recommended wearing a “good mask.” The tweet below relates his GMA mandate support.
In May 2022, he was still expressing his maskoholism:
In August 2022, he was still mask obsessed and averse to indoor dining:
Viewing the above tweets on Twitter reveals an extremely long thread wherein Wachter justifies his decision. He then posted another pamphlet-length Twitter thread in September 2022 in which he relates (tweet below) that he might start living a quasi-quasi-normal life again.
Frankly, this interminable tweeting about your own actions smacks of narcissism. The bottom line, however, is that Wachter was GMA-ed and masked to the hilt and still got sick — as did his son and wife.
But he’s luckier than some. Just consider 52-year-old Dr. Sohrab Lutchmedial, a cardiologist, who’d written in July 2021 about people whose refusal of the GMA shot is for “selfish” reasons: “I won’t cry at their funeral.”
Four months later, the apparently healthy physician died in his sleep — two weeks after his third coronavirus jab.
Then there’s CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen. Though an immigrant from China, Wen not only joined Wachter in supporting Covid mandates, but actually stated that people refusing the GMAs shouldn’t be allowed to leave their homes (Beijing-style, I guess). Yet in August 2022 she announced that she no longer supported mask mandates for children. Did she finally realize that Covid poses virtually no risk to kids? Actually, her reason was different:
Masking her young son had caused him developmental problems.
Of course, if Wen had read The New American and taken its reporting seriously, she wouldn’t have hurt her son. We’d warned long before, after all, that masking children was dangerous.
Yet as I often point out, the problem is not that the world’s Wachters and Wens fell victim to lies; it’s that they’re the type of people who could fall victim to those lies.
And this hasn’t changed.
Neither Wachter nor Wen exhibit the humility necessary for growth in wisdom; neither acknowledges his fundamental errors. In fact, Wen rationalizes away her changed prescription, claiming that with the more contagious omicron variant’s arrival, her desired goal of containing Covid-19 “was not reachable.”
Never mind that a doctor, writing at the liberal Atlantic magazine early in the pandemic (February 2020), suggested that “‘cold and flu season’ could become ‘cold and flu and COVID-19 season,’” that a vaccine wouldn’t save us, and that “you’re likely to get the coronavirus.” The wise always knew.
I would never see a doctor or hire the services of anyone who not only could fall victim to such lies, but whose character defects preclude self-correction. This all brings to mind, too, G.K. Chesterton’s observation that a “great man knows he is not God, and the greater he is the better he knows it.” Wachter’s and Wen’s lack of humility ensures that they’ll never be great physicians.
So it’s ironic, but you must be small to be great.