EDER DONS SACKCLOTH AND ASHES, CRIES ALL WAY TO BANK

Special to El Rrun-Rrun

Someone tell PA Eder Hernandez that the deal is done.

He and his medical doctor associate Dr. Teresa Saavedra closed out the monopoly COVID-19 testing contract between Urgent Med Care and the City of Brownsville Friday.

Hernandez said that after a good run between late March and the end of July where they were paid for performing "more than 12,000" city-funded tests it was time to move back to their private practice to continue "helping the community" and said their "success" and safety of the team was because of the "grace of God" and was a testament to "science over politics."

Some city officials and local attorneys remember things a bit different. For while both Saavedra and Hernandez say the city "came to us" and offered them the gig, there had been extensive talks between other local physicians and the city on setting up the testing.

In fact, in some of those early some of those talks, they remember that City of Brownsville Commissioner Dr. Rose Gowen, sat in and tossed about specifics on the setting up the site. How "the city", because no one is saying who decided, opted for Saavedra (a family doctor who started with Su Clinica like Gowen) and Hernandez, a lowly PA, to be handed the contract does ring a lot like "politics" rather than any measure of competitive scientific expertise.

Hernandez responded to this criticism over the apparent lack of physician supervision over his operations by citing an April 5 waiver by Gov. Greg Abbott that allows more flexibility between physicians and the PAs and Advance Practice Registered Nurses they supervise including allowing for oral prescriptive delegation agreements and waiving fingerprinting.

But Abbott signed that waiver on April 5, about 10 days after the drive-through testing had started.

When it was obvious to city officials that the COVID-19 infection was peaking in mid-July and that one testing site in the city wasn't enough, two other companies were hired and Urgent Med Care saw the writing on the wall.

They abruptly announced last week that Friday was the last day they would conduct the tests at the Brownsville Sports Park and said they would go after the night crowd, offering their services at their new clinic that would open from 5 p.m. to midnight.

On the podcast with Castro who effusively thanked them for their service, both thanked the city and its financial department, and invited the public to their new offices.

But there was no question that Hernandez bristled at any hint of criticism over the handling of the testing which many people said took too long and by making the person wait as long as a week to 10 days to get results, could actually spread the virus to those around them.

In fact, that has been a constant Hernandez characteristic. He openly came into a dispute with another podcaster when he advocated a treatment involving two FDA-approved drugs that weren't recommended for COVID-19, only to back off after someone tagged the host's Facebook site and his site was closed for pushing unproven "cures."

The treatment method included two FDA-approved drugs, ivermectin and dexamethasone, which Eder and wife claimed had resulted in a 100 percent survival rate for more than 1,000-COVID-19 positive patients referred to his clinic. (Did Saavedra approve of the non-FDA-approved remedio as his medical supervisor? And the nicotine patches that turned out to be anecdotal, were they supervised as well?)

Hernandez has painted himself as a persecuted man of God – a martyr – who has overcome the work of the devil against his benevolent acts and has prevailed, thanks to Da Lawd. A classic example has to be his invoking God against the devil in evil men against him in his Facebook posts and asking God to get on with the Second Coming after water flooded into a  Reynosa maternity clinic.

Sometimes prophecy is a risky business as when the crystal ball proved a bit cloudy when he went on a podcast with Realtor Craig Groves in April and predicted that the city would flatten the COVID-19 curve "in the next two weeks."

Self promotion has never been a problem for our martyr, however. During the podcast with Castro he dubiously claimed that after studying international efforts, he had instituted the testing procedures before anyone else in the world.


"We wrote the book on how to deliver mass testing," he claimed to Castro's approbation. "No one had ever done that before."

So a Brownsville PA beat out the medical experts in Europe and then New York and elsewhere?

His latest post has some of his acquaintances concerned and wondering whether he is carrying the God-thing a bit far. (And not like Him who would turn the other cheek, Da humble prophet's supporters have taken to posting a mug shot on Facebook of a PI arrest I had two years ago. Christians shoot messengers, too?).

In the latest installment of the Book of Eder he compares himself to Joseph of the Old Testament whose bothers sold him into slavery and he overcame their evil and emerged triumphant just before he died.

Let's hope the stress isn't getting to Eder. After his superhuman efforts to save the lives of his fellow men (for a slight fee, of  course) he can carry his earnings in his sackcloth and cover himself with ashes all the way to the bank and forego demise for a bit longer.