The first shipment of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine arrived in Louisiana the week starting Dec. 14, 2020, including these doses that arrived at Ochsner Lafayette General. (Photo courtesy Ochsner Health)
A state legislative hearing Wednesday that lawmakers said was to review Louisiana’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic turned into a forum for anti-vaccine advocates and proponents for alternative cures.
The Louisiana House Select Committee on Homeland Security convened Wednesday for the first of two meetings meant to evaluate how the state responded to the coronavirus. The second takes place Thursday.
Lawmakers invited Dr. Richard Bartlett of Odessa, Texas, to speak. Bartlett is a devout Christian who practices family medicine and authored a book in 2018 on “doctor confirmed miracles.”
He made headlines across Texas in the spring of 2020 after he claimed to have a simple cure for COVID-19 using budesonide, an inhaled corticosteroid commonly used for asthma. Early news reports hailed it as a “silver bullet” cure, and in August 2020 Bartlett told a Christian radio station that he saw a 100% cure rate in his clinic, including among “the sickest of the sick.”
An Oxford University study that included two randomized controlled trials gave credence to Bartlett’s claims, but a subsequent analysis and additional studies cast doubt on the effectiveness of the treatment.
Bartlett claimed that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was part of a worldwide campaign to discredit the Oxford study and other forms of early treatment.
Bartlett’s two-hour presentation to the committee contained numerous short video clips of Fauci and screenshots of frightening headlines about vaccines in an effort to support his case. Most of his material came from far-right media sources and contained elements of truth mixed with unproven or misleading claims.
He suggested lawmakers codify protections for doctor-patient relationships and the autonomy of patients to choose the treatments they want. Bartlett later walked some of this back when Rep. Phillip Tarver, R-Lake Charles, pointed out that Louisiana restricts treatment options for women that involve abortion.
“I want to be careful about that thinking because we do not agree with that in terms of some of the abortion-type things,” Tarver said.
The committee invited similar testimony from New York lawyer Aaron Siri, who specializes in vaccine injuries, and from former ophthalmologist Dr. Holly Groh of New Orleans, who shared her experiences with helping treat unvaccinated homeless people.
The exorbitant amount of claims presented to the committee on Wednesday, particularly those from Bartlett and Siri, make it nearly impossible to do a complete fact-check of the hearing, so the Illuminator has focused on some of the more significant claims.
Checking the facts
Claim: Budesonide is an effective treatment for COVID-19 infections.
Fact check: Partially true. Research has found budesonide to be effective at treating the symptoms of COVID-19, but its results are mixed.
A study published in the Journal of Microbiology, Immunology and Infection in 2023 analyzed nine randomized controlled trials (including the Oxford trials) involving more than 4,000 patients to test the efficacy of budesonide for COVID-19. The study found budesonide showed significant benefits for symptom relief, however, the inhalant proved no ability to prevent hospitalization or death from COVID-19.
The consensus among the medical community is that prevention through immunization is the best way to fight the virus.
Claim: Dr. Anthony Fauci lied to Congress about the National Institutes of Health’s involvement in so-called “gain-of-function” research at the Wuhan Institute in China.
Fact check: True, but lacking context. During a 2021 congressional hearing, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, got into a heated debate with Fauci as part of Republicans’ investigation into the origins of COVID-19. In response to Paul’s questioning, Fauci claimed the NIH had not funded any gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute. His statement was later contradicted by documents and other NIH officials.
Fauci, who has been defended by Democrats and villainized by Republicans, later said the contradiction was the result of different definitions of gain-of-function research. In general, it is a method of studying enhanced viruses as a way to combat them, and it has become a big target of proponents of the theory that COVID-19 either accidentally or was purposely leaked from the Wuhan lab.
Many scientists say gain-of-function research is worthwhile, though it does carry risks. Early investigations into the Wuhan Institute were stymied by the Chinese government. Some Democrats, including President Joe Biden, have said an accidental lab leak was plausible and worthy of investigation, while some Republicans have made much stronger accusations such as falsely blaming Fauci for helping create the virus.
Claim: COVID-19 vaccines are unsafe, and many more vaccinated people are dying.
Fact check: False. Bartlett pointed to a study that showed mRNA vaccines cause “ribosomal frameshifting,” which he described as the production of abnormal proteins that can be mechanisms for cancer. But that is not what the study concluded.
In a screenshot he presented of the study’s abstract, Bartlett underlined one part of a sentence but ignored the part that states the proteins have caused “no ill-effects, keeping with the extensive safety data on these COVID-19 vaccines.”
According to a Science magazine review of the study, frameshifting is a natural occurrence in the body during viral infections. The effect might even provide added benefit by broadening the body’s immune response, the researchers said.
Vaccine skeptics often cite data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System to try to support claims that vaccines are dangerous, but VAERS is a passive monitoring system that anyone can use to make a claim of a vaccine injury. Experts can use it to find safety indicators that can be further investigated. The VAERS site makes clear that the existence of a reported event after a vaccine doesn’t necessarily mean the vaccine is what caused the event.
The same false logic can be used to blame Dr. Bartlett’s preferred treatment of budesonide for killing people. Several patients died or were hospitalized after receiving budesonide during the inhaled corticosteroid trials, but researchers haven’t linked those outcomes to the inhalants.
Claim: The vaccines don’t work, and vaccinated people started dying more in 2022.
Fact check: False. The death rate among unvaccinated people has always been many times greater than that among the vaccinated even though vaccinated people began to make up a significant proportion of COVID-19 deaths in 2022.
Taken at surface level, the coronavirus death data might appear as if vaccination is having no effect, but this perception is known as the “base rate fallacy,” according to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data cited in Scientific American.
One must consider the sizes of the two groups. Over 81% of Americans have received at least one vaccine dose for COVID-19, and 70% have received two, according to the CDC.
The telling indicators are in the death rates per 100,000 people in each of the two groups. Those rates show the unvaccinated dying at a much greater proportion than vaccinated people.
FEMA scrutinizes New Orleans overflow site
Wednesday’s committee hearing began with testimony from Jacques Thibodeaux, director of the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security & Emergency Preparedness.
He confirmed to lawmakers that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has launched an inquiry into possible fraud at a makeshift hospital in New Orleans, set up at the Morial Convention Center to handle potential overflow from other hospitals .
GOHSEP turned a portion of the convention center into what was effectively a 1,300-bed hospital with a staff of roughly 500. Only about a hundred of the beds were ever put to use at a cost of over $100 million, Thibodeaux said.
The federal government paid the tab, but officials with the Federal Emergency Management Agency are now taking a closer look.
“We know exactly where it was spent,” said Thibodeaux, who was not the GOHSEP director at that time. Information is being provided to FEMA, but he declined to go into specifics, saying he anticipates having to respond to a subpoena regarding the matter.
Thibodeaux kept his testimony largely nonpartisan through some of the more pointed questions and comments from certain lawmakers.
“In my opinion, some of what we were ordered as citizens to do violated our constitutional rights,” Rep. Beryl Amedee, R-Gray, said.
Amedee’s opinion was shared by many conservatives at that time who equated the inconveniences of social distancing and wearing a cloth mask with violations of constitutional rights.
At its peak, the virus was killing more than 3,000 people per day nationwide and has claimed a total of 1.2 million lives in the U.S. — roughly twice the number of Americans who died in every war and conflict combined since 1775.
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