Industrial Censorship

Censorship operates in ways that are far more complicated than a government getting between journalists and a story, though that’s one element of what happened in America.

As The Intercept previously reported, the Trump administration contributed to the suppression of Covid journalism by tightening HIPAA guidelines on media access to health care facilities. In May 2020, the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees HIPAA, reinforced a set of restrictions on hospitals letting journalists inside. However, the fact that some journalists got access to United Memorial and other facilities shows that a willing hospital could open its doors.

In other words, the White House’s instructions were not ironclad. This was less a matter of state censorship and more a matter of industrial censorship. When you step back, it’s truly remarkable that in an era of hypersurveillance, with cameras in everyone’s phones, with billions of images and videos created and shared every day, there was so little to be seen of the virus’s victims in the first months of the pandemic. In many ways, it is easier to find pictures of Americans suffering from the 1918 flu pandemic than from Covid a century later.

United Memorial’s defiance of the tide is explained by a single, illuminating factor. It is a small hospital and was pretty much ruled by one person last year — Varon. He was the chief of staff, chief of critical care, and chair of its board (though he recently stepped down from those positions and is now chief of Covid-19 and critical care). Varon is a confidence-filled maverick who does not mind the attention of the media or the disapproval of his peers. This year, for instance, he took another unconventional path by prescribing the human version of the drug ivermectin to some of his patients, in concert with treatments the Food and Drug Administration has approved for Covid-19. Last year, when he began bringing journalists inside the hospital, United Memorial’s general counsel “wasn’t too happy,” Varon recalled, but he bulldozed ahead.

Varon has spent a lifetime making diagnoses, and he has one for his profession in an era of pandemics. “The problem is that big hospitals are run by lawyers,” he said. “They are not run by doctors.”

CONTACT THE AUTHOR:

Peter Maasspeter.maass@​theintercept.com@maassp




ADDITIONAL CREDITS:

Research: W. Paul Smith.

(Sources: The Intercept)