ALEX BERENSON: On the bizarre anger and meanness of our public health betters

I can’t stop thinking about Dr. Christina Propst — the Houston physician who mocked the victims of last Friday’s Texas floods.

“They deny climate change. May they get what they voted for,” she wrote on Facebook last weekend, as rescuers had just begun wading through downed trees and wrecked cabins in search of the living and the dead. “Bless their hearts.”

Propst wasn’t just a doctor. She was a pediatrician. And many of the dead were children. How could someone whose job is caring for kids be so callous? 

But it turns that post wasn’t Propst’s first moment in the spotlight. During Covid, reporters repeatedly featured her calls for mandatory masks in schools and jabs for kids. She wrote an op-ed for the Houston Chronicle and even appeared on MSNBC. Yes, Dr. Christina Propst was a class-A medical Covidian.

Like so many Covidians, Propst has impeccable credentials. 

She attended Horace Mann, a fancy high school in the Bronx1, then Princeton University, then medical school at New Orleans’s Tulane University.

She’s now a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Council on Children and Disasters and the Texas Pediatric Society Committee on Infectious Diseases and Immunizations. Until this week, she worked at Blue Fish Pediatrics, a Houston-area chain with offices mostly in the city’s wealthy suburbs and exurbs. (Blue Fish fired her after a backlash to her post spread across social media.) 

Blue Fish is the kind of pediatrics practice that has a “New Patient Application.” Yes, they’ll let you know if your kid is good enough for them to treat. 

It’s also the kind of pediatrics practice that only takes kids if their parents agree to follow the entire AAP vaccine schedule, with a prissy little explanation:

By following the American Academy of Pediatrics immunization schedule, we’re ensuring our patients receive vaccines at the optimal time, maximizing their protection against vaccine-preventable diseases following a proven, safe, and time-tested schedule. 

It’s also the kind of pediatrics practice that has an online button so parents can get refills for their children’s ADHD medicines — amphetamines, by another name — without even having to call. The “ADHD Refill” button comes first on Blue Fish’s pages.

GRTWT.