Leana Wen Accused of 'Unsafe, Ableist, Fatphobic, and Unethical Practices' for Opposing COVID MandatesThe left-leaning commentator wants to get back to normal. So more than 600 experts want to censor her.
BILLY BINION
8.24.2022
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, one character has ruffled more feathers than perhaps anyone else in the public health sphere. It's not Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who recently declared himself the symbol of scientific "integrity and truth." It's Leana Wen, the medical doctor, pundit, and COVID hawk-turned-COVID normalizer. Once the target of conservative outrage over COVID mandates, Wen is now being targeted by left-leaning public health advocates who oppose her insistence that COVID is now endemic and we need to live with it.
In response to to Wen's advocacy, a petition is circulating online seeking to have her booted as a speaker from the 2022 American Public Health Association (APHA) Annual Meeting and likening her current public-health advice—she opposes mandates and emphasizes vaccines, personal risk reduction, and an attempt at cultivating normalcy—as one rooted in eugenics. "We are demanding our colleagues and fellow leaders in public health to reconsider and replace Dr. Wen with someone whose work is consistent with anti-racist, anti-eugenicist public health practices and community health," the letter reads.
The ordeal is a perfect example of how difficult it has become to have a normal discussion in a public forum about anything. I empathize deeply with anyone still anxious about the threat that the coronavirus poses to them, a legitimate fear for many people who are elderly, disabled, or immunocompromised. This isn't a hypothetical for me: I'm on a cocktail of immunosuppressants. COVID has been a weird and strange time. But Wen is not a eugenicist, and her ideas aren't either.
Consider some of the claims made by the displeased AHPA attendees. "Through her platform on news outlets and social media, Dr. Wen has promoted unscientific, unsafe, ableist, fatphobic, and unethical practices during the COVID-19 pandemic," reads the petition, which has been signed by over 600 public-health researchers, professors, students, and physicians.
To support that claim that Wen subscribes to views that are "unscientific," the petitioners point to a tweet from March of this year in which Wen noted that "everything has risk, and zero covid is not a viable strategy." That benign assertion is arguably scientific fact, recently touted by the head of the World Health Organization. Yet in this instance it's been deemed so unscientific and unsafe that it should preclude Wen from speaking in public.
That sort of weak reasoning pervades the rest of their claims. Wen is allegedly fatphobic because she suggests not eating a donut every day; she is ableist because she says people should make decisions based on personal risk tolerance; she is unethical because she agreed with the latest CDC guidelines. If someone is unfit for a public speaking engagement because she is in step with the nation's top public health agency—the one not exactly known for throwing caution to the wind, the one that seeks to police everything from how much wine you drink to how much meat you eat—then who, exactly, is safe to speak?
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Source:
https://reason.com/2022/08/24/leana-wen-accused-of-unsafe-ableist-fatphobic-and-unethical-practices-for-opposing-covid-mandates/
