On the bizarre anger and meanness of our public health betters

I can’t stop thinking about Dr. Christina Propst — the Houston physician who mocked the victims of last Friday’s Texas floods.

“They deny climate change. May they get what they voted for,” she wrote on Facebook last weekend, as rescuers had just begun wading through downed trees and wrecked cabins in search of the living and the dead. “Bless their hearts.”

Propst wasn’t just a doctor. She was a pediatrician. And many of the dead were children. How could someone whose job is caring for kids be so callous?

But it turns that post wasn’t Propst’s first moment in the spotlight. During Covid, reporters repeatedly featured her calls for mandatory masks in schools and jabs for kids. She wrote an op-ed for the Houston Chronicle and even appeared on MSNBC. Yes, Dr. Christina Propst was a class-A medical Covidian.

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Like so many Covidians, Propst has impeccable credentials.

She attended Horace Mann, a fancy high school in the Bronx1, then Princeton University, then medical school at New Orleans’s Tulane University.

She’s now a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Council on Children and Disasters and the Texas Pediatric Society Committee on Infectious Diseases and Immunizations. Until this week, she worked at Blue Fish Pediatrics, a Houston-area chain with offices mostly in the city’s wealthy suburbs and exurbs. (Blue Fish fired her after a backlash to her post spread across social media.)

Blue Fish is the kind of pediatrics practice that has a “New Patient Application.” Yes, they’ll let you know if your kid is good enough for them to treat.

It’s also the kind of pediatrics practice that only takes kids if their parents agree to follow the entire AAP vaccine schedule, with a prissy little explanation:

By following the American Academy of Pediatrics immunization schedule, we’re ensuring our patients receive vaccines at the optimal time, maximizing their protection against vaccine-preventable diseases following a proven, safe, and time-tested schedule.

It’s also the kind of pediatrics practice that has an online button so parents can get refills for their children’s ADHD medicines — amphetamines, by another name — without even having to call. The “ADHD Refill” button comes first on Blue Fish’s pages.

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(Call 1-800-COCAINE!)

SOURCE

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This is medicine in United States today.

The people who consider themselves stewards of children’s health will ban parents who question the pincushion American vaccine schedule but hand out amphetamines to kids at the push of a button.

Along the way, they fool themselves into thinking that they are following scientific principles, when in reality their political views affect them as much as everyone else — if not more, because they think they are smarter and more objective than they are. The results would be comic, if they weren’t so dangerous.

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(Watching the watchers. For less than 15 cents a day.)

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Trying to make little kids wear masks a year into Covid wasn’t just useless. It hurt their ability to learn social cues and language, and just as importantly made school unpleasant and depressing at a time when the epidemic had already upended many of their home lives. And by mid-2021 (actually much earlier), it was obvious both that Covid posed no risk to healthy kids and that masks and mask mandates did not work, particularly for kids, who hated them and touched them constantly.

But pediatricians like Propst couldn’t see past the fact that Republican governors were the ones who stood up to teachers’ unions on the issue.

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Every once in a while, though, the credentialists and establishmentarians let the mask slip and say what they really think: that the rest of us are lucky to have them setting the rules. That they’re better. And that if we won’t listen we deserve what we get.

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(Sometimes you don’t get to take it back)

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What’s amazing is that — despite losing her job, despite blowback that has spread past Texas and even outside the United States — Dr. Christina Propst has not yet seen fit to apologize for what she wrote.

Maybe she doesn’t think she should have to.

Bless your heart, Christina.