What Dr. Sanjiv Gandhi's ouster says about B.C.'s political culture
By now, I expect that the media onslaught against Dr. Sanjiv Gandhi is diminishing. At the risk of subjecting myself to a social media mobbing, I’m going to say a few things in defence of the former deputy leader of the B.C. Green Party.
His troubles began when a political commentator and longtime admirer of Dr. Bonnie Henry discovered that Gandhi had “liked a tweet” comparing her to Nazi monster Josef Mengele. Given that Gandhi had launched his campaign in Vancouver-Renfrew against Health Minister Adrian Dix in late September, it’s not a stretch to imagine that a Dix sympathizer passed it along to this commentator.
This commentator actually has a photo of Dix at the top of his feed, so he would be the obvious choice for such a tip. Plus, this commentator has been one of Henry’s most aggressive defenders in the legislature press gallery.
Gandhi says that his “like” was a mistake. He stated that he had intended to like another post criticizing healthcare delivery in B.C. But a third party quoted the original tweet, tagged Gandhi, and threw in the Mengele mention—and that’s the tweet that he had “liked”. Who knows if he even saw the name “Mengele” when he hit the like button?
“We can be passionate and aggressive in criticizing the government but personal attacks are categorically wrong, as was my misplaced ‘like’,” he wrote. “Realizing my mistake, I have ‘unliked’ that third-party tweet.”
He noted that as someone who has experienced considerable racism in his life, he knows that words matter. According to Gandhi, he does “not condone the belittling or demonization of any group of people for any reason, including those based on race or religion”.
“I am very sorry for the harm I have caused,” Gandhi stated.
I believe Gandhi when he says that he did not intend to like a tweet comparing Henry to Mengele. As someone who has worked in journalism for more than three decades, I can say that it’s very unusual for a licensed professional—whether this person is a doctor, lawyer, dentist, or engineer—to publicly slam another person in their profession, because that brings on heat from the regulator.
But after Gandhi shared his explanation of his error, the commentator jumped in by highlighting another tweet that Gandhi had liked. This other tweet called Dix a “charlatan eugenicist” and stated that the BC NDP doesn’t care whether we live or die.
This tweet, too, was by a third party, who had tagged Gandhi. It was attached to another tweet by Dix critic Tom Jackman. Jackman had highlighted a rather preposterous statement by Dix about the importance of doctors, nurses, and healthcare workers seeing one another’s faces during a period when COVID cases were “relatively lower”.
Zooming out on this story
Let’s step back and look at the bigger picture. Gandhi is the former chief of the division of cardiothoracic surgery at B.C. Children’s Hospital, a position he held for 13 years. He has performed heart surgery that has saved the lives of many children. He has also been placed in the unenviable position of having to tell parents when their babies have not survived surgery. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
He knows how the healthcare system works from the inside, including how patients move in and out of hospitals. He has read countless scientific papers on healthcare, setting him apart from every MLA in the B.C. legislature.
Gandhi can wrap his mind around complicated topics. He’s articulate. And he posed a threat to the B.C. NDP in an election campaign, even if he were to lose his seat, because he can highlight the shortcomings of the healthcare system better than any opposition politician.
That could be very damaging to the B.C. NDP in a political campaign, particularly if Gandhi regularly made the rounds of radio talk shows.
Even worse for the B.C. NDP, Gandhi has read the medical literature around COVID-19. This includes the relationship of COVID-19 to brain injuries, heart attacks, and other cardiovascular problems. He knows how blood vessels circulate through the body. He is also up to speed on medical literature on how COVID-19 is transmitted through the air.
As a result, Gandhi had to be neutralized as the B.C. NDP approaches a provincial election in less than a year. What better way than to ferret through his Twitter feed, focusing on his “likes” as well as his actual tweets?
After the offending like was revealed, a chorus of devastating comments came forth, including from the premier, who called it a “reprehensible” attack. Advanced Education Minister Selina Robinson characterized Gandhi’s “like” as “absolutely outrageous”. Dix described it as “revolting”.
There was zero acknowledgement by these politicians that Gandhi might have simply hit the wrong tiny heart by accident on his social-media feed.
Political scientist Hamish Telford then questioned B.C. Green Leader Sonia Furstenau’s judgment. Good god. For choosing a pediatric cardiac surgeon as deputy leader?
For her part, Furstenau tweeted that she had removed Gandhi as deputy leader and accepted his resignation as a candidate. She left the impression that the B.C. Greens’ vetting system was somehow flawed. There were no words about Gandhi’s tremendous contributions to the province, let alone a request that he remain as a candidate in Vancouver-Renfrew.
I’ve seen this movie before in provincial and municipal politics. People with good intentions and with good hearts say or do something stupid on one occasion, sometimes even in their youth, and they’re vilified by a social media mob. Then they disappear from politics, feeling forever scarred by getting too close to the flame.
Journalists are invariably willing accomplices in these takedowns. These stories are easy to do and often come straight from a political party or campaign’s opposition research department.
COVID-19 fallout
The reality is that Henry, who is B.C.’s provincial health officer, ignored the precautionary principle in her determination to remove a provincewide mask mandate that governed B.C. Ferries, transit systems, schools, and post-secondary institutions. In the wake of this, there was a colossal increase in COVID-19 transmission among those 19 years of age and younger during the 2021-22 school year.
Moreover, there’s a growing body of research about Long COVID, which affects approximately 65 million people worldwide, according to a study earlier this year in Nature.
“More than 200 symptoms have been identified with impacts on multiple organ systems,” the researchers stated in this paper.
You read that correctly: more than 200 symptoms!
Various health advocacy groups have repeatedly called on the B.C. NDP government to take stronger actions to diminish the spread of COVID and all of its complications, including brain injuries and heart attacks. They’ve often asked the government to do more to prevent Long COVID in children. These pleas have mostly been ignored. For a very long time, Henry and Dix underplayed Long COVID.
Meanwhile, rampant absences from work are having a detrimental impact on ferry service. The B.C. media, however, rarely link cancellations of sailings to COVID-19 or Long COVID. Nor is it commonly suggested that this might be a product of hundreds of people walking around indoors on the ferries without masks.
As for any claims of eugenics, well, here’s what some have stated on this topic south of the border.
In HPHR, which is published by the Boston Congress of Public Health, Willamette University law professor Laura Appleman wrote a paper entitled “Hiding in Plain Sight: Public Health, Eugenics, and COVID-19”.
“Far from being a shameful moment of our past, eugenic philosophy is alive and well in the twenty-first century,” Appleman declared at the beginning of her meticulously footnoted paper. “Nowhere has this been more apparent than in our response to the current public health crisis.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the viral nature of eugenic philosophy, which has continued to guide U.S. treatment of the captive and vulnerable for over 100 years,” she continued. “The long tail of eugenics informs our choices over those we institutionalize, detain, and sequester in long-term care and group homes.”
Then there’s this, by Jacqueline R. Fox, a professor of law at the University of South Carolina School of Law.
“Healthism and its sibling, eugenics, have been unapologetically espoused during the COVID pandemic by our country’s leadership,” Fox wrote in 2021. “The quick dismissal of the aged and other vulnerable people became commonplace trope of the Trump administration and was often repeated and amplified by people who did not want to take even minimal precautions against becoming sick or sickening others.”
Martha Lincoln, a San Francisco State University assistant professor of cultural and medical anthropology, didn’t use the term “eugenics” in a blistering article entitled “The Years of Magical Thinking: Pandemic Necrosecurity Under Trump and Biden”.
But she did point out that this “cultural idea” of necrosecurity embraces the notion that “mass death among less grievable subjects plays an essential role in maintaining social welfare and public order”.
“Beginning roughly in the worst weeks of the Omicron surge, the Biden administration has been characterized as giving up on its COVID response. It has also visibly pivoted to an approach grounded in the same kind of magical thinking that characterized the Trump era,” Lincoln wrote. “The White House has crafted messages that perversely normalized illness, stigmatized masking, promoted a defeatist ‘new normal,’ and, as journalist Katherine Wu wrote, killed a pandemic strategy grounded in the principles of population health.”
Some of these same criticisms have been levelled against Dr. Bonnie Henry and Adrian Dix. Yet when the B.C. Greens question the B.C. NDP government’s defeatist approach to COVID-19, they’re condemned by some members of the press gallery.
We’ve reached a point where an outstanding candidate like Gandhi—who had the potential to shake the political world out of its torpor around COVID-19 and save some lives—is viewed with disdain by the political class, including lobbyists who’ve pushed for fewer restrictions.
Let that be a message to any other medical professional horrified by the COVID-19 free-for-all. This is what happens if you put your name forward as a candidate for provincial office.
In the meantime, a great deal of time and effort has been invested in turning Dr. Bonnie Henry into a modern-day saint of public health. In reality, she’s a well-paid bureaucrat who advances health messages embraced by her political masters.
You can bet that if Henry ever did anything that truly upset the B.C. NDP’s re-election plans, she would be gone in a jiffy. Just like Dr. Sanjiv Gandhi.