After learning that several players on the Miami Marlins baseball team had tested positive for the Covid-19 virus, the team went ahead with a scheduled game on Sunday, July 26. How did they make the decision to play? Using a group text app led by the Miguel Rojas the “unofficial team captain” of the club, the players decided they would go ahead with the next game. Bleacher Reports quoted Rojas as saying the Marlins never considered not playing.

No article about this incident mentioned anything about a physician being involved in the decision. Since Sunday’s game, positive tests have been found for 15 players and 2 staff, none of whom is symptomatic. This event has disrupted the already truncated baseball season.

Another incident in Florida involves many physicians. The Miami Herald reported 17 University of Florida anesthesiology trainees and one support staff member contracted Covid-19 after attending a party at a private home in early July. From the Herald article: “The UF Health outbreak illustrates the difficulties of stemming the spread of the pandemic, when even trained health care professionals can be sickened from a private party in Florida—one of the nation’s hot spots for the virus—after explicit warnings about the risks from social gatherings.”

My take on this sad story is how can we expect the public to follow our recommendations if physicians can’t even follow the simple mitigation guidelines? I would like to see how the anesthesia call schedule looked after this disaster.

Finally, here’s a headline I bet you thought you’d never see:

That doctor’s name is Stella Immanuel. She gave a speech in front of the Supreme Court building during a rally by a few physicians nearly all of whom do not care directly for Covid-19 patients but call themselves “America’s Frontline Doctors.” The website for that organization disappeared on Tuesday, July 28, but the story of Dr. Immanuel lives on. Her major points were despite the lack of scientific proof, hydroxychloroquine cures the virus and that masks do not need to be worn—although she does make her staff wear masks.

The Daily Beast reported the video of her speech has been taken down from social media sites because it contains disinformation about the virus. She said that if Facebook did not restore the video, Jesus Christ would destroy its servers.

It gets much worse. Immanuel, trained as a pediatrician, practices family medicine in Texas. She has produced many YouTube videos and posts on her website claiming several outrageous things such as:

“Endometriosis, cysts, infertility, and impotence are caused by sex with ‘spirit husbands’ and ‘spirit wives’—a phenomenon Immanuel describes essentially as witches and demons having sex with people in a dreamworld.”

People can tell if they have taken a demonic spirit husband or spirit wife if they have a sex dream about someone they know or a celebrity, wake up aroused, stop getting along with their real-world spouse, lose money, or generally experience any hardship.

“There are people that are ruling this nation that are not even human,” Immanuel said in her 2015 Illuminati sermon, before launching into a conversation she had with a “reptilian spirit” she described as “half-human, half-ET.”

Here’s what she thought about The Daily Beast article. It’s a tweet thanking The Daily Beast for exposing incubus and succubus.

The most amazing thing is the number of favorable responses to this tweet. [Click on the upper part of the figure to go directly to Twitter.] As I’ve said before, I fear for the future of this country.

 

Skeptical Scalpel is a retired surgeon and was a surgical department chair and residency program director for many years. He is board-certified in general surgery and a surgical sub-specialty and has re-certified in both several times.For the last 9 years, he has been blogging at SkepticalScalpel.blogspot.com and tweeting as @SkepticScalpel. His blog has had more than 3,700,000 page views, and he has over 21,000 followers on Twitter.

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