Senate invites fringe, unscientific medical group to testify about COVID

On Tuesday, the US Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs will host a hearing on treatments for COVID-19. The four witnesses all have MDs, and three of them work at hospitals, suggesting that this is a case where the Senate will be receiving information from people with relevant expertise. It’s the fourth witness, however, that suggests some of the testimony may go completely off the rails and raises further doubts that US politicians are taking a raging pandemic seriously.

Jane Orient has an MD and is the head of a serious-sounding organization called the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS). But a quick look at the group’s history shows that it has adopted positions—such as promoting chloroquine and opposing government vaccination programs—that make it a questionable source of COVID-19 information. And the AAPS actually has a long history of adopting extreme and fringe positions that run contrary to all evidence, in part because of its opposition to government involvement in anything. But because of these libertarian tendencies, the group has maintained a close relationship with conservative politicians.

Bad pandemic advice

It doesn’t take much searching to determine that the AAPS has fringe views about the pandemic. In late April, evidence was developing that hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug, wasn’t effective against COVID-19, leading the FDA to scale back its emergency approval. Four days after that decision, the AAPS sent out a press release claiming that the drug “has about 90 percent chance of helping COVID-19 patients.” That claim was false at the time—it was apparently based simply on counting any studies that saw any effect toward that 90-percent total. And subsequent studies have clearly indicated the drug is ineffective.

Yet in June, the AAPS ran an op-ed complaining about the government’s limitation of the drug’s approval. The piece called for Trump to bypass the FDA to make the drug widely available so that every patient could evaluate the evidence on their own. And as recently as September it was still claiming that “the body of peer-reviewed research, based on clinical experience, in support of HCQ continues to grow.” By September, so many studies had indicated the drug was ineffective that it was no longer the subject of serious conversation.

Also alarming is the organization’s view on social restrictions to limit the virus’s spread. By October of this year, it was clear that limiting interactions among people successfully cut the spread of the disease, and many of the US’ problems could be traced to lifting these restrictions too soon. Studies of locations with successful lockdowns also demonstrated their effectiveness. Yet just a week ahead of Orient’s testimony, the organization published an op-ed that slammed the use of restrictions to limit the spread of the disease and accused the experts who advocated for them of “channeling Communist China.”

As we don’t have effective therapies and seem incapable of following social limits, most hopes for limiting the impact of the pandemic now focus on the availability of vaccines, which are already being considered for emergency use authorization. But Orient said as recently as Sunday, “It seems to me reckless to be pushing people to take risks when you don’t know what the risks are.” This statement ignores the fact that the vaccines are currently in large-scale trials to determine those risks.

That position is not limited to COVID-19 vaccines, however. In February, before there was general awareness that the virus had gone global, Orient issued a statement to a different Senate committee in which she asked, “But how much of a threat is required to justify forcing people to accept government-imposed risks?”

Those risks? Vaccines, which she said cause “many serious complications.”

This nonsense was predictable

A different perspective such as Orient’s can be valuable if it’s an informed one. The fact that the AAPS is ignoring the growing bodies of evidence about pandemic treatment and control, however, suggests that information has nothing to do with the group’s perspective. But it doesn’t take much looking to figure out that the group’s perspective is consistently driven by ideology, which then causes it to take positions that fly in the face of mountains of evidence.

Take the opposition to vaccine mandates, which springs from the group’s ideological mistrust of government involvement in the healthcare system. There’s nothing factually incorrect about an opinion like this, yet it has driven the group to attack the safety of vaccines, such as when its main “research” publication ran a piece by two antivaccine activists. In it, they echoed the long-debunked and completely false claim that vaccines are linked to problems like autism.

Something similar happened with HIV/AIDS, where the group objected to the government’s involvement in programs to limit the spread of the disease and do the research that enabled the development of treatments. Its journal ran a piece that claimed “both official reports and the peer-reviewed literature afford substantive grounds for doubting that HIV is the necessary and sufficient cause of AIDS and that antiretroviral treatment is unambiguously beneficial.” This is denial of a connection that has become a well-established fact through countless studies.

The group has taken a similar approach to issues that haven’t even heavily involved the medical community, like climate change. Noted denialists have used its journal to claim that there’s no evidence of warming and suggest that climate researchers are being driven to their conclusions by a desire for research funds. Unsurprisingly, Jane Orient of the AAPS is also active in the Heartland Institute, the US’ leading climate denialist organization. Again, the group’s ideological concerns have caused it to adopt positions that are contrary to mountains of evidence.

My enemy’s enemy…

Why would anyone welcome the input of an organization that has such an extensive history of denying basic facts? It goes back to the ideological underpinnings that motivate this denial, which are focused on the libertarian idea of limiting the government’s activities. So it’s not surprising that Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was once a member of the group and had courted its members during his first run for Congress. And Tom Price, the former head of the Department of Health and Human Services, the government arm that has funded much of the research that the AAPS refuses to believe, was a member of the group while he was up for confirmation to that position.

The AAPS has returned the support, attacking conservatives’ political opponents. Its website still hosts a piece that suggests former President Barack Obama generated his support due to his ability to use his speeches to perform “hypnotic induction” on his audiences. And in its response to the 2020 presidential election, the organization published an op-ed that echoed Trump’s talking points both before and after the election:

One is hard-pressed to deny that Joe Biden is a weak, corrupt, pathologically lying, creepy dirty old man who has lived off the government teat for 50 years. And he allegedly won the 2020 presidential election. Are Americans that ignorant? Or has Joseph Stalin’s political philosophy that has been simmering in America for years finally come to fruition?

As an added bonus, the piece once again repeats the false claim that hydroxychloroquine has produced positive results when used to treat COVID-19. The organization freely mixes its derangements.

Ultimately, the group’s support from politicians and its invitation to mislead Congress come from a small collection of failures. The Senate should actually take the time to examine the expertise of people asked to give testimony to it and has either failed to do so or decided it doesn’t care. The likely reason the senators in the Republican majority wouldn’t care is because they are sympathetic to the AAPS’ libertarian ideology and appreciate its attacks on Democrats.

But critical thinking requires us to evaluate the reliability of the source of any information we use and to reject that information if the source fails that evaluation—even if we like some of the other things they say. The fact that so much of the US government fails this test of critical thinking is a key contributor to the fact that the pandemic is spreading nearly unchecked within the US.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1728137