By Susan Shelley
July 21, 2022
A behind-the-scenes disagreement over L.A. County’s COVID response has now become public.
On July 13, the CEO of L.A. County-USC Medical Center, Jorge Orozco, held a video town-hall meeting for employees. With him were two doctors: LAC-USC’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Brad Spellberg, and epidemiologist Dr. Paul Holtom.
In the video, which is on YouTube but unlisted, Dr. Spellberg explains that the COVID infection numbers they’re seeing are flat.
“It’s just the same,” he said emphatically. “It’s not changed. It’s been the same. It’s like two months of ‘the same.’”
Meanwhile, L.A. County Public Health Director Dr. Barbara Ferrer, who is not a medical doctor, is preparing to impose another indoor mask mandate on the entire county, population 10 million. She asserts that the county is barreling toward the Center for Disease Prevention’s “high” category of virus activity, with “cases” rising sharply.
“The numbers at LAC, COVID-positive tests, have continued to go up,” Dr. Spellberg said, and then forcefully added, “BUT this isn’t because we’re seeing a ton of people with symptomatic disease getting admitted.” He repeated, pointing to a graph, “It’s the same thing. We’re seeing a lot of people with mild disease in urgent care or [emergency department] who go home and do NOT get admitted, and of those who are admitted, they’re, 90% of the time, not admitted due to COVID.”
Dr. Spellberg said even those patients who go to the ICU do not have COVID pneumonia and are not placed on ventilators. They are not these “horrible” cases, he said, and they have not seen one of those since February.
“It is just not the same pandemic that it was, despite all of the media hype to the contrary,” Dr. Spellberg said.
“Yeah, public health is scared,” the hospital CEO added. Dr. Spellberg shrugged in an “I don’t know what to do with these people anymore” manner.
“A lot of people have bad colds, is what we’re seeing,” he said, raising his arms in an exaggerated shrug again.
Dr. Spellberg has a BA in molecular cell biology-immunology from UC Berkeley and attended medical school at UCLA, where he received multiple academic honors. He completed his residency in internal medicine and a subspecialty fellowship in infectious diseases at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.
Dr. Ferrer has a Ph.D. in social welfare from Brandeis University, a Master of Arts in Public Health from Boston University, a Master of Arts in education from the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and a Bachelor of Arts in Community Studies from UC Santa Cruz. Her biography says she has over 30 years of experience as a “philanthropic strategist” as well as a “public health director, educational leader, researcher and community advocate.”
A “philanthropic strategist” raises money, and one way to do that is to shout that there is a terrifying crisis and everyone must immediately stop what they’re doing to focus on the need to do whatever the philanthropic strategist is requesting.
The difference between a philanthropic strategist and a public health director is that a public health director can shut down your business by revoking the necessary health permits to keep it open.
Dr. Holtom, the LAC-USC epidemiologist, noted that “Dr. Barbara Ferrer is expected today, based on numbers, to probably announce that L.A. County will go into a mask mandate situation for all indoor and large activities, that’s expected this afternoon, but we have not seen the final numbers that she may or may not choose to act on at that point.”
Ferrer is not consulting or sharing her numbers with the leading medical doctors in the county public health system.
“If the experience of our hospital is reflective of [hospitals] across the county as I believe it is,” said Dr. Holtom, “we’re just seeing nobody with severe COVID disease. As of this morning, we had no one in the hospital who had pulmonary disease due to COVID. Nobody in the hospital. We have 24 people who tested positive for COVID but nobody, nobody who had COVID-19 disease as we would see in the past.”
The L.A. County Board of Supervisors had better get a grip on this before businesses are burdened with more mandates for signage, more employee training and more fines, and before fear-mongering harms more people.
Fire Barbara Ferrer.
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Write to Susan at Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley.
This column was originally published by the Southern California News Group.