DELUSIONAL PA EDER HERNANDEZ "ALLIED" WITH BIDEN TEAM

Special to El Rrun-Rrun

Jesus-driven anti-COVID-19 crusader Physician Assistant Eder Hernandez  – tagging with Dr. Robert "Lucky" Rodriguez, a Brownsville physician and professor of emergency medicine at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine who was named to President-elect Joe Biden’s 13-member coronavirus task force – claims he and other doctors are part of a "team" making history.

Hernandez also numbers Dr. Pierre Kory, a pulmonary specialist at Aurora St. Luke’s Medical Center, as a part to his illusionary "alliance."

Here's how the Associated Press described  Kory and the group of doctors who testified at a U.S.Senate hearing chaired by Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, of Wisconsin:

"Johnson and the witnesses he called accused the medical establishment and health agencies of failing to explore and promote the use of relatively inexpensive drugs previously approved for other uses as early interventions against the coronavirus, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

Dr. Pierre Kory, a pulmonary specialist at Aurora St. Luke’s Medical Center, touted Ivermectin as a “wonder drug.” It is used to treat parasitic infections, but the National Institutes of Health has recommended against using it for COVID-19 outside of clinical trials.

“We are telling the world this is the solution to COVID-19,” Kory said.

Others cited hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug touted by President Donald Trump but that the Food and Drug Administration said was ineffective against COVID-19. The FDA revoked its emergency use authorization for the drug as a COVID-19 treatment this summer, saying the risks of taking it could outweigh the benefits.

The hearing held by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee drew criticism from doctors and Democrats.

“We are facing a dangerous barrage of misinformation that ignores evidence and dismisses the scientific process, undermining our national response and belief in science,” said a group of medical and scientific experts in advance of the hearing.

Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, the top Democrat on the panel, said the hearing was “playing politics with public health."

Hernandez, whose employer Valley Urgent Med was granted the monopoly of COVID-19 testing by the City of Brownsville in March that continued to August and raked in more than $850,000, repeated the discredited claims made by Kory and his "team." To his credit, he had been able to use his friendship with city some commissioners and Mayor Trey Mendez and made them believe he was on the cutting edge of COVID-19 testing and treatment based on his reading about international efforts on the Internet. 

He publicly touted the use of nicotine patches to ward off infection at his testing staff, a claim since discredited by researchers. He widely disseminated his bogus claims on social media.

Hernandez was allowed to implement the city's testing strategy to address the COVID-19 outbreak and immediately designed a strategy designed to fail, which it did. Besides touting the anti-parasitic Ivermectin, he established the testing site in far-off Brownsville Sports Park which was not served by mass transit and which could not be accessed unless one owned a car or had someone drive them out there, and restricted the testing to only those who passed his staff-administered questionnaire. 

The result? 

City health officials received a skewered data set which was not representative of the entire city's population, and provided policy makers with a useless gauge of the COVID-19 infection across the city. As a result, this false picture of the virus' spread resulted in ineffective responses which only compounded the situation and led to misguided policy decisions by the city's administration and elected officials.

His claim that he had the "cure" for COVID-19 was disputed by locals in social media and he withdrew it, only to be called to taken to task for his unfounded assertions.

Rodriguez, in contrast, was appointed to Transition COVID-19 Advisory Board which is made up exclusively of leading public health experts, who will advise Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris on how to deal with the pandemic, which Biden called “one of the most important battles our administration will face.”

Rodriguez graduated from Harvard Medical School and currently serves as a professor of emergency medicine and chairman of clinical research at the UCSF medical school, where he works on the front line in the emergency department and ICU of two major trauma centers. 

He has also held important positions at Stanford University Medical Center, UT Southwestern Medical Center and Methodist Medical Center, both in Dallas, the UT Health Science Center San Antonio and the Regional Academic Health Center Campus in Harlingen.

Rodriguez has authored over 100 scientific publications, including the impact of the acceleration of the COVID-19 pandemic on the mental health of front-line health care providers, and another study examining the impact of Donald Trump’s statements during his campaign and presidency on Latinos’ perceptions of safety and access to emergency care.

In the study on Latinos, undocumented immigrants as well as legal residents/citizens, Rodriguez’s study found a strong link between Trump’s statements and fear on the part of undocumented and legal resident/citizen Latinos about living in the United States and accessing emergency medical care.

By August, when the virus spun out of control, Hernandez and his staff quit the testing game and trudged wearily to the bank to cash in their loot. Meanwhile, the virus continues to ravage the South Texas and national population. However, Hernandez, now selling private testing, counts the real physicians on the national scene among his "team" and writing history. 

And as is his wont, he cloaks all this with a mantle of pious religiosity to ward off the infidels. And God forbid you don't believe. He'd call upon the host of heaven and earth to ward you off. 

"This is our alliance," Hernandez claims in latest post. "...Together we have saved thousands of lives to the glory of God and his son Christ Jesus."