YOU WON'T HAVE EDER TO KICK AROUND ANY MORE

By Juan Montoya

Brownsville Physician Assistant Eder Hernandez has submitted his letter putting the city on notice that as of today he is terminating his contractual relationship and will no longer be conducting COVID-19 testing at the Brownsville Sports Park.

Hernandez, who operated under the supervision of physicians at Valley Med Urgent Care (owned by a Dr. Abdur Rauf with a Houston office. There is no physician listed locally), was the Brownsville poster child of COVID-19 testing and often acted as the city's very public lightning rod on their virus efforts. His personal association with Mayor Trey Mendez and commissioner Jessica Tetreau played no small role in his snagging of a monopoly for the testing as far back as March.

In a way, Hernandez and his crew are taking the money and running. Things have gotten a bit warm lately. The new transformation is to offer private night time COVID-19 testing to cash in on a service no one is offering.

Hernandez got the endorsement of the mayor who said patients seeking tests with health insurance would be referred to Hernandez's private clinic and those that didn't would be funneled to the city's Sports Park complex also operated by Hernandez.

"The people who are looking for the test, if they have medical insurance, then the medical insurance will be taken through the office of Dr. [Eder] Hernandez,” Mendez said then. “If for any reason they don’t have insurance, then there are funds available through the City of Brownsville to cover that."

Until two other firms were hired in the first week of July to handle the increased demand for tests, Hernandez owned the COVID-19 testing monopoly in town and decided who would get tested based on a questionnaire.

During that time, his meter was running and the invoices of the tests – whether the results were positive or negative – were processed by the city's finance department and duly paid out to Hernandez's Valley Medical Urgent Care LLC.

The first invoice was for a modest $2,027.10. But 89 invoices later, on July 24, that total has risen to an astronomical $814, 851.60.
(Click on graphic to enlarge.)


The other two late comers – The Port Occupational and Medical Clinic LLC and Reliable Urgent Care and Occupational Medicine – lag far behind in chips. The first has been paid in $163,464 in testing bills, and the latter $63,286, but both are quickly gaining ground on Hernandez's outfit.

All told, as of July 30, the city had paid $1,041,601 for the COVID-19 testing to the three firms and Hernandez's clinic has gotten 78.2 percent of those payments. That's just for the testing. What Hernandez' clinic and his employer have earned from the patients seeking medical care after testing positive or referred to them by the city because they had insurance is anyone's guess.

But the city's cozy relations with PA Hernandez – who along the way nurtured social media fame – fueled criticism from people who complained that the city should have a medical doctor in charge of its COVID-19 efforts since ultimately a physician had to sign off on treatments and assume the legal responsibility for those decisions.

And a mounting number of complaints said the method used by the city's COVID-19 testing efforts were outmoded and were contributing to the spread of the virus because of the length of time between having the test performed and the time before they were informed of the results. All that time, they said, the patient was interacting with the general public and possibly infecting people and their family.

They questioned why the UTRGV test site and others could cut the waiting time for results by more than half compared to Valley Med Urgent Care.

Be that as it may, everything was rolling along fine until Hernandez started pitching a treatment method (a "cocktail") that included FDA-approved drugs ivermectin and dexamethasone.

He was not shy about sharing it with social media and when someone lifted his claims from a local page and passed along his recommended treatment on Facebook, things fell apart.

Ivermectin is an FDA-approved drug initially used to treat intestinal parasites and heart worms in animals and river blindness, parasites, and head lice in humans. Dexamethasone is an anti-inflammatory medication said to be effective to help COVID-19 patients to breathe after the virus invades the lungs.

In vitro data suggest that ivermectin has direct activity against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), although no current data are available to support its use for management of COVID-19, and no group has recommended its use.

The "treatment" has not been approved by the FDA which frowns on any claims of a "cure" for the virus. And as far as the use of nicotine patches, news reports indicates that the supposed effectiveness has been anecdotal in nature in France and has not been scientifically proven.

Hernandez and wife claimed that they had had 100 percent success rate in the treatment of more than 1,000 patients who had tested positive for COVID-19.

When it was tagged on Realtor Craig Grove's
Brownsville Living page, Facebook shut it down which set off Grove after Hernandez went on a local podcast and debunked a similar method used by a team headed by a black female doctor.

In a podcast with Groves in April Hernandez predicted that the city would flatten the curve on COVID-19 "in the next two weeks."

That, of course, never happened and today Cameron and Hidalgo counties are the "hotspots" in the State
of Texas.

The question then becomes, since the city was Valley Med Urgent Care's primary medical referral for COVID-19, would any patient having adverse reactions to the treatment they received there result in a legal liability for the city?


Social media consumers who have read Hernandez's posting have detected a hyper-defensive evangelical streak which he reveals when his methods are criticized.

In numerous instances, he has called upon the wrath of Lord Almighty to smite his foes, return and take his children in the Second Coming and later, when posters are skeptical of his self-righteous posturings, succumbs to the demon's  temptation and just says "fck 'em."

Nonetheless, just as he has his detractors, he also has a rabid following who call upon God to come to his defense.

"Your attempt to defame him is pathetic and shows the evil hearts of people on this post...Your comments are baseless and not credible but only show your evil lying men Hearts. He is a hero on the eyes of many and no matter what lies you post about him or his family. He has won, as he puts his trust in God not men."

That was quickly answered by: " Are you delusional? Not only was he not the first to set up testing, he did it all wrong. He did not follow the NY model which had mass testing before Brownsville even thought of it. Every medical professional in the country believes the system he is using is actually spreading the virus. He wants his money so he will not call out Trey for only giving him a system which every medical professional has deemed as contributing to the spread. A true medical professional would refuse to be party to the city's refusal to use the current testing system. But Eder wants his money so he remains quiet and helps the virus spread."

And the middle-of-the-roader who suggests that: "Let's do bids. Bid this COVID testing out. This virus will continue for awhile and this pseudo doctor is getting wealthy off our tax dollars. Come on City Commission and Mayor do your job and bid this testing out the way it should be. DO YOUR JOB. Get a real doctor or at least a PA that doesn't pass himself off as a doctor."

On its face, this would seem like a good idea. Since we have the University of Texas Medical School in Edinburg and its satellite campus in Brownsville, maybe they could borrow some of the equipment they have in Austin that can do this.Trey is a Texas-EX, maybe he could put a bug in his alma mater's ear. 

"The university can test hundreds of symptomatic students using in-house labs and has three rapid testing machines that can provide results in 15 minutes. The university will also continue to conduct voluntary contact tracing through a partnership with Dell Medical School and Austin Public Health."

How about it Trey? Now that prophet Eder has taken his swabs and gone home, you are our only salvation.