Welcome to the latest edition of Investigative Roundup, highlighting some of the best investigative reporting on healthcare each week.
Two ‘Disinfo Docs’ Now Have Leading Public Health Roles
Joseph Ladapo, MD, PhD, and Ryan Cole, MD, spread disinformation about COVID-19. Now they’re in prominent public health positions.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) appointed Ladapo to the position of state Surgeon General on Tuesday, and commissioners of Idaho’s largest county appointed Cole to its health board last week.
Ladapo has been known for his Wall Street Journal op-eds questioning COVID vaccines, masks, lockdowns, and more, while Cole is known for disparaging COVID vaccines and for not getting vaccinated himself.
As Florida Surgeon General, Ladapo will oversee the state’s department of health. According to the Miami Herald, when asked whether Florida should be promoting vaccination, Ladapo said it “should be promoting good health, and vaccination isn’t the only path for that. It’s been treated almost like a religion, and that’s just senseless.”
He said the state should be supporting many measures for good health: “vaccination, losing weight, exercising more [and] eating more fruits and vegetables.”
Ladapo, whose primary affiliation is with the University of California Los Angeles, also said he’s a “good friend” of Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, the Stanford professor who is one of the leaders of the Great Barrington Declaration. Bhattacharya has also become one of DeSantis’s top public health consultants, the Herald reported.
Ladapo said he signed the Great Barrington Declaration, although “there were a couple of things I didn’t agree with,” according to the Herald.
Ladapo still needs to be confirmed by Florida’s Republican-controlled Senate.
Cole was appointed to the health board of Idaho’s Ada County, where Boise is located, after it had let go another member over their support for pandemic restrictions, according to the Washington Post. That board member had held the position for 15 years and was a former president of the American Academy of Family Physicians.
Many wanted an epidemiologist endorsed by the Idaho Medical Association to take the seat, but Ada County Commissioners gave the job to Cole for his “outsider” perspective and his willingness to question medical norms, the Post reported.
Cole is a pathologist who runs a medical testing center in Boise, according to the Post.
Meanwhile, the state activated its “crisis standards of care” for two regions where COVID-19 patients were overwhelming hospitals earlier this month.
Despite these appointments, calls for physicians who spread COVID-19 disinformation are growing louder. On Tuesday, five physicians co-authored an op-ed in the Washington Post urging medical boards to take action against doctors who spread COVID falsehoods.
They also launched a website, nolicensefordisinformation.org, “to help identify the most egregious professional offenders.”
“We are encouraging other health-care workers to join our effort, and we hope members of the public will use the website to report bad actors to their individual state medical licensing boards,” they wrote.
Pediatrician May Be Ousted From School Board Over Masks
Tracie Newman, MD, MPH, of Sanford Health in Fargo, North Dakota, faces a campaign led by angry parents to recall her from the city’s school board, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Their ire was drawn mainly by Newman’s recommendation that kids wear masks in school this fall. The school board voted for Newman’s recommendations in August, enacting a mask mandate.
Opposition led by parent Allie Ollenburger has garnered some 3,000 signatures to recall Newman and other board members. If those signatures are certified, four school board slots will be open in a special election in January, according to the WSJ.
Newman, a mother of three kids who also serves as the county’s public health officer, said she now enters school board meetings through a back door to avoid angry parents. She has received threatening voicemails, and had her integrity questioned, with some accusing her of taking money from mask makers. Someone sent photos of her unmasked at a gala to a local paper as evidence of her hypocrisy, WSJ reported.
“At first it was arguing with my guidelines. Then it was disagreeing with the data I was using,” she told WSJ. “Now the third and ugliest stage is people attacking my integrity.”
The news outlet reported that there have been more than 60 efforts across the U.S. this year to recall school board members, according to Ballotpedia. That’s the most in the 15 years that Ballotpedia has kept track, and 60% cite COVID restrictions as motivation to oust them.
Congress Probes NASEM Panelists’ Financial Ties
The House Committee on Oversight and Reform is asking the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) for documents regarding financial conflicts among panelists on an upcoming organ donation report, Kaiser Health News reported.
The House probe, led by Reps. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) and Katie Porter (D-Calif.), follows the resignation last week of Yolanda Becker, MD, a former transplant surgeon, from the panel charged with authoring that report. The resignation came after the Washington Post questioned whether a job Becker recently took with consulting firm Transplant Solutions caused a conflict of interest.
Krishnamoorthi and Porter are asking for the conflict disclosure forms that all panelists filed with NASEM — documents that weren’t provided to KHN in a recent and similar investigation into conflicts among panelists on a drug waste report.
The final NASEM drug waste report declared financial conflicts with pharmaceutical companies for two members, but not for two others who had extensive and recent financial ties to the drug industry. NASEM told KHN that those members had no current conflicts when they drafted the report, but KHN found conflicts from 2020 and 2021.
The report’s conclusion was favorable to industry, recommending that companies should not refund taxpayers for the cost of wasted medications, and that Medicare should not track the cost of wasted drugs.
Earlier this month, NASEM told KHN that it implemented a new disclosure policy requiring committee members to report relationships for the past 5 years, going beyond its previous policy of reporting current conflicts.
Source: MedicalNewsToday.com
