When Dr. Monica Gandhi went on television last week to blast public health officials’ response to the Cal football COVID outbreak, her false claims fanned the flames of the controversy into a full-blown conflagration.
Players were already whining about having to undergo testing for the virus. The outbreak of what was then reported as 44 cases among players and staff had prompted the postponement of Cal’s game against USC and was blamed for the Bears’ shorthanded loss to previously winless Arizona.
Then Gandhi, a UCSF professor of medicine, popped off. Among her peers, she is often an outlier, considered well-informed but one of the pandemic’s more controversial infectious disease experts. She said that the entire football team should not have been tested because almost all members were vaccinated and free of symptoms.
“The public health strategy in this case was off and they were doing mass testing of people who didn’t need it,” Gandhi said in a KPIX interview. This news organization reported on Gandhi’s claims the following day, and the story made the front page of the paper the day after.
But Gandhi’s premise that the Cal cases were largely asymptomatic was wrong. Unfortunately, neither she nor the reporters had confirmed the number of symptomatic cases with the university. And, until then, the university had held that information tight.
Finally, in a virtual meeting with players’ parents the day after Gandhi’s television interview, and in subsequent emails to me,...
A Coral Springs woman was indicted in federal court for her alleged role in a $58.3 million Medicare fraud scheme built around medically unnecessary orthotic braces, federal prosecutors announced ...