Sure, that’s why I said 99% not 100%. You’ll find a few people here and there that disagree but for every one you find, I could name ten more that agree. They’re the outlier.
And I’m not even trying to argue that I’m 100% certain I’m right. I never say that in my office. I’m not God, I can almost never give you a 100% answer in medicine. All we can do as physicians is follow the data. My point here is that 99% of physicians have followed the data to the same conclusions, and that’s a pretty significant thing.
I was a pretty apolitical guy until politics started throwing a wrench in my profession. I pretty much despise Trump for what he did to cause mass confusion and distrust of the healthcare system. Now, I agree that the CDC and Fauci at times did a REALLY poor job on messaging and that didn’t help. For instance, I was really disappointed initially when Fauci told the public not to go out and buy masks because they weren’t going to help. He was speaking hyperbolically. The idea at that time was that we were in a very real crunch of medical professionals potentially not having enough PPE and they didn’t want the public buying up what PPE there was available. But then he had to reverse course later and encourage mask wearing. Which sowed public distrust and Trump pounced on it for political points. What he should have said was “hey masks do work but they only work really well if everyone is wearing one. So you going out and getting a mask while no one else has one in isn’t going to help you all that much. So, please, right now, don’t get them. Medical professionals desperately need these and if the public at large is buying it all, the people who REALLY need it are going to suffer.” Then you don’t backtrack when guidance changes. But that’s a really tough job to try to communicate to the public so I give him some grace for mistakes he made.