HJBR Nov/Dec 2024

HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF BATON ROUGE I  NOV / DEC 2024 17 THE PROMPT I think we should in the future. And, I’m so glad you’re here to talk about these things. I did want to ask you one question about the chilling effect that Rep. Owen brought up. In hospitals, a patient or a doctor that’s working within a hospital situation, do you know anything about how that relationship was?And what the expectations were of the hospital systems on those physicians. Abraham On some local level, I do. Unfor- tunately, even we as private physicians, it would literally take almost an act of Con- gress for me to see even a patient of mine that had gone through the emergency room and was in ICU, because they had these [“COVID wards”]. I mean, it was almost an armed guard situation. I got to some of my patients by being really frank and aggressive at times, not physically, but just pushing the envelope. That said, “These are my patients. I want to see them,”but I got pushback from the hospital. To Dr. Coleman’s point and my point earlier, a lot of these hospital doctors that I knew personally, they feared for their livelihoods if they went against the federal narrative. They wanted to do things, and the question is, “Why didn’t they?”That’s a question that I can’t answer for them, but I’ve had conversations with several, and they were basically told that if you don’t toe the line that’s coming down from the CDC, you’re history. Rep. Crews Do you think some of that was based on maybe financial incentives or something? I’m trying to figure in the mind of how they made their decisions and why the hospitals may have pushed certain atti- tudes or agendas. Coleman You know, I think early on, every- body was scared. It was pretty scary early. It’s easy to Monday morning quarterback now in 2024, but you know, in 2020 it was a scary deal. And the hospitalists, my hats off to them. I mean, it was a rough situa- tion where they were short staffed, and they were taking care of a lot of really sick people. So, the idea that it was a hoax or something like that — I mean, you hear that push —well, that’s counterproductive, too, because this was something new. People did really get sick. And I think they were doing what they could to survive. With all the measures, and this is not specific to the hospital —masking, 6 feet of social distancing, various things like that — I am sympathetic to people who said, “We want we want to do something. We want to do something to try to improve the situation.” But when it was obvious that it was doing nothing, doubling down was the problem. We should have fallen back to that idea, “Let’s go back to freedom now, when we know that this is not working.” Rep. Crews You know, we had some inter- esting testimony yesterday. We’re going to do some more today from a doctor, who was volunteering at a shelter and had some 3000 guests that weren’t social distance; didn’t wear masks; weren’t vac- cinated largely, a few of them were, she’ll talk about, and yet they were better off than the population that was doing those things. And it made me think of an old story with this old airline pilot getting ready to retire. There’s a news reporter in the cockpit for the last flight, wants to ask him questions, and how do you make it 35 years or whatever it was? And he goes, “I’m sure you’ve had these problems, engine problems, maybe fire, hydraulic.”“Well, yeah, I’ve had all those over my career.” The reporter says, “How did you manage this to get 35-years with- out a single accident?” And he goes, “Well, whenever there was an emergency, the first thing I do is wind my watch.” And the reporter was like, “Wind your watch. That makes no sense. Why would you do that?” He said, “Well, as far as I know, no one ever killed anybody winding their watch.” Abraham That’s right. Rep. Crews So I’m trying to say, in a lot of cases it sounds like doing nothing might have been better than some of the things we did do. And I like your approach, “When in doubt, choose freedom.” Dr. Coleman, passing it on to Dr. Abraham. I think that’s a wise choice. And I think in the future, I think that’s going to be a great attitude. I hope LDH will take that on, too. I did want to ask two more quick questions: Dr. Abraham, did you personally have any criticism or retri- bution from the Department of Health or Board of Medical Examiners? Abraham I did not. Rep. Crews If you could, a lot of people here, when they hear steroids, they think of ana- bolic and people going to work out. Could you clarify the steroids that you’re talking about? Abraham The ones that we were using, and still use them daily in my medical practice, these are not the anabolic steroids, these are the steroids that are anti-inflammatory in nature. They don’t bulk you up. They take inflammation out of your body. So yeah, apples and oranges for sure. Rep. Phillip Eric Tarver This was kind of posed to me in a fashion during the early months and throughout the next 12 to 18 months of COVID, there was ivermectin and one of the roles and responsibilities of the Department of Health is to protect us, correct? To protect the public Abraham [Nods head, yes.] Rep. Tarver And there was a lot of empha- sis on ivermectin and forbidding the use of it in order to protect, I guess. But, there’s also another rampant drug, fentanyl, and I’m just curious about where the empha- sis was during those days, and maybe even still is, about protecting the public. Which one do you think is kind of more important? Which one was given the most emphasis at that time? Because there were a lot of people who were suffering, families suf- fering dearly with the fentanyl. And I’m not