The city Health Department “whistleblower” reassigned after he called out as political correctness run amok the agency’s tepid response to the monkeypox outbreak says it also mishandled the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dr. Don Weiss, the veteran surveillance director who was shifted to another unit unrelated to his expertise after disagreeing with department brass over monkeypox messaging, said “too often public health policy has cared more about optics than data” — particularly citing what he deemed as onerous and unnecessary COVID-19 testing requirements for kids in schools.
“Take school testing for COVID-19. It didn’t take long to show that few kids were testing positive and that transmission in schools was not a major contributor to the pandemic,” Weiss said in an extraordinary “leadership” letter posted on his personal website.
“Yet we still continued to force it upon children and families,” he said.
Weiss also said the city’s contact tracing program was an expensive $1 billion plus bust.
“Several of us in the bureau said contact tracing wasn’t likely to work and the pandemic flu plan didn’t include this activity,” he said.
“And did any of our testing and contact tracing have much of an effect? All you need to do is look at the waves, particularly the Omicron wave. We had no shortage of testing and a fully staffed contact tracing operation, and we still had a peak of > 60,000 cases per day,” said Weiss.
He said officials were “using teaspoons.(expensive ones) to bail out a...
Medicare and Medicaid provide health care coverage to millions of Americans and are aggressively protected by federal and state authorities. The Department of Health and Human Services Office of In...