The Oregonian's education reporter promotes bogus science, downplays current health crisis

In her December 5, 2022 article, "RSV and flu are on the rise, but masks aren’t coming back to Portland-area schools for now," The Oregonian's new k-12 education reporter, Julia Silverman, minimizes the urgency of the local health crisis while attempting to discredit sound science on the effectiveness of masking in preventing the spread of COVID-19 in schools. Meanwhile, state health departments and experts across the country, including the Center for Disease Control (CDC), recommend masking as the "trifecta" of COVID, influenza, and Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) rages on.

In light of the intense strain on area healthcare facilities--in particular children's hospitals--due to staffing challenges and high numbers of patients with the flu, COVID, and RSV, Multnomah County Health Department has issued a "strong public advisory" for "everyone, including in K-12 schools and childcare centers, to wear masks in public indoor spaces until at least Jan. 1, 2023 due to the surge in respiratory winter viruses." On December 1, Kaiser Permanente, Legacy Health, OHSU Health, Providence put forth a joint statement urging the public to mask indoors to curb the spread of disease. Neighboring California is a "hot zone" of flu and COVID cases with Los Angeles County in such a state of alarm that officials are considering bringing back the mask mandate. Hospitals in Washington state are also overwhelmed. Nationally, people infected with COVID are currently dying two to three times the rate at which people die of flu, and COVID infection numbers are sharply increasing, as are COVID deaths. 

As Oregon Capital Chronicle reports, "the current crisis involving a disease called RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, that primarily affects children along with influenza, other diseases and COVID-19 is one of the worst the state has faced to date, hospital officials told a state legislative committee on Wednesday.

The article continues: "'This public health emergency literally constitutes the greatest threat to children’s health in our state that we have seen in the last 30 years,' Dr. Dana Braner, chief physician at Oregon Health & Science University’s Doernbecher Children’s Hospital in Portland, told the committee."

Yet Silverman, who has a track record of spreading medical misinformation, uses her platform in the state's most widely read newspaper to downplay the extent of the health crisis and cast doubt on the role of masking, one of the most powerful forms of mitigation to slow respiratory virus transmission. 

Silverman chooses her wording strategically, bending her reporting on the state of the health crisis toward toxic positivity. This technique has the effect of minimizing the seriousness of the healthcare emergency and tempering the warnings and advisories issued by health authorities and providers. Two examples of this minimizing tactic employed by Silverman are (italics font added for emphasis): 

• "Pediatric intensive care units at the metro area’s three major hospital systems have switched to crisis standards of care, which allows medical staff to care for more patients at once," and 
• "Hospitalizations of people with or for COVID-19 are also rising again, though they are not expected to hit anywhere near the peak levels seen in summer of 2021 and early winter of 2022."

Silverman clings on to the disproven idea that masks are ineffective, if not useless. She writes: "studies on whether (mandatory masking) policy substantially reduced transmission of COVID in schools have produced mixed results, with some pointing to meaningful and measurable effects and others suggesting otherwise." Silverman links a recent New York Times article reporting on a study showing masks are an effective form of mitigation in schools, and in the same breath gives equal consideration to discredited COVID-19 minimizers who argue that "school-based mask mandates have limited to no impact on the case rates of COVID-19 among K-12 students." 

The study Silverman shares to cast doubt on the efficacy of masks in curbing the spread of respiratory disease is co-authored by Dr. Neeraj Sood and Dr. Tracy Høeg, two members of the COVID skeptic group, Urgency of Normal, as well as Shannon Heick, clinical social worker at Valley Christian Counseling at the University of North Dakota. The fourth and final "co-author" of the "study" listed is Joshua Stevenson, a fringe anti-masker who was found to belong to and has since scrubbed his social media imprint clean of evidence of his membership in the dubious COVID denier group called the Rational Ground. 

Dr. Høeg's track record includes a widely criticized manuscript wrongly claiming that vaccinating 12-17 year olds against COVID-19 is more dangerous than COVID-19 because of post-vaccination myocarditis. Medical researcher, surgical oncologist, Professor of Surgery and Oncology and managing editor of the publication, Science-Based Medicine, Dr. David Gorski, categorized Høeg's now retracted 2021 paper as a dumpster dive into the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). The term "dumpster dive" commonly refers to antivaxxers' misuse of VAERS, which Dr. Gorski defines as "a database to which anyone can report any adverse event (AE) noted after vaccination." Dr. Gorski describes VAERS as an "early warning system that can generate hypotheses regarding correlations between specific AEs and vaccines, but by its very design cannot test these hypotheses." Dr. Gorski further explains: "Because of its very nature, VAERS is prone to misunderstanding and misuse, and, unsurprisingly, VAERS has become a favorite tool of antivaxxers to claim that vaccines cause whatever AE on which they want to blame vaccines." Dr. Gorski makes the case that Dr. Høeg's work is damaging and contributes to "the false narrative that masks and vaccines to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 are at best useless in children or even worse than the disease." 

Urgency of Normal, the COVID skeptic group to which Dr. Høeg belongs, and whose arguments Gorski calls out as eugenicist thinking, is popular with the Oregon-based vocal, anti-teacher, anti-union parent group and political action committee, ED300. These groups have cherry-picked, miscited and misinterpreted scientific data while emphasizing natural immunity, which is premised on ignoring the risk of infection for populations with a higher rate of chronic comorbidities, namely communities of color. At least one prominent member of ED300, veterinarian and public health professor, Dr. Leslie Bienen, is also a member of Urgency of Normal. Bienen has been a frequent pundit on various media outlets in the past two years, arguing against school building closures and COVID mitigations. Bienen, like other ED300 and Urgency of Normal members, spreads medical misinformation, minimizing the dangers of COVID, and has even written for the ultra conservative publication, The Manhattan Institute's City Journal, in what looks to be part of a broader anti-mitigation campaign with ties to organizations funded by wealthy radical right donors. ED300's Bienen and Kim McGair, along with Dr. Sood as well as MacKensey Pulliam, head of the notoriously pro-privatization, anti-teacher Oregon Moms Union, co-signed the June 2022 Urgency of Normal open letter urging the CDC to drop its remaining mitigation protocols and treat COVID-19 infections "similarly to other seasonal respiratory viruses, which do not require routine testing or isolation."

We are now seeing the aftermath of these and similar groups' campaigns to let COVID freely and repeatedly rip through the population, increasing serious health risks with each reinfection and weakening post-infection immune systems, thus making people more susceptible to further infections. The pandemic is far from over, the trifecta of COVID, flu, and RSV is overtaxing our hospitals, infection numbers continue to rise, and long COVID is turning out to affect a steadily growing, sizable population of all ages.

No reputable publication should give its writers a carte blanche to spread misinformation. Clearly, The Oregonian needs to fact-check its journalists more closely or else it is complicit in spreading "alternative facts" aka lies that contradict the public health messaging meant to prevent healthcare worker burnout, and most importantly, serious illness, even death, especially among children in our community.