Last week, two frontline doctors who said they have administered more than 5,000 coronavirus tests, made headlines when they compared the coronavirus to the seasonal flu and called for an end to quarantine practices.
Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi of Accelerated Urgent Care in Bakersfield, California, presented their medical advice in a video briefing with KERO-TV that the news outlet then uploaded to YouTube. The video quickly went viral, garnering more than 5.46 million views.
But on Monday, the video was taken down for “violating YouTube’s Terms of Service.”
“Anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations would be a violation of our policy … [removal] is another really important part of of our policy,” YouTube said.
What did they say?
In the video briefing, Erickson and Massihi pushed back against the conventional narrative regarding the dangers of COVID-19 and the effectiveness of social distancing measures.
“Do we need to still shelter in place? Our answer is emphatically no,” Erickson said. “Do we need businesses to be shut down? Emphatically no. Do we need to test them and get them back to work? Absolutely.”
Erickson went on to say that COVID-19 and the seasonal flu are “similar in their prevalence and death rates.”
“If you study the numbers in 2017 and 2018, we had 50 to 60 million with the flu,” Erickson said. “And we had a similar death rate in the deaths the United States were 43,545 — similar to the flu of 2017-2018. We always have between 37,000 and 60,000 deaths in the United States, every single year. No pandemic talk. No shelter in place. No shutting down businesses.”
He also warned that quarantining could lead to weakened immune systems.
Drs. Erickson and Massihi run a private medical clinic called Accelerated Urgent Care in Bakersfield, CA. They are medical doctors, not epidemiologists. The video was taken down because it made several errors and data misinterpretations that led them to conclude that the death rate and prevalence rate of COVID-19 are comparable to that of the seasonal flu. Not true. Among these errors was equating “test-positive rate” with “prevalence rate.” They’re not the same. There are many other examples of scientific ineptitude that you can read about here: http://blog.deonandan.com/wordpress/2020/04/covid19-lets-talk-about-the-bakersfield-duo.html?fbclid=IwAR2CbpHYsdk1n11ys-wQH3Ps4QFXtZOlsQTHp2-AVIcIKlzBHOv7lBmv8dE
The American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine (AAEM) posted a joint statement that said “Drs. Erickson and Messihi are releasing biased, non-peer reviewed data to advance their personal financial interests without regard for the public’s health.”