Facebook, the festering hell pit where America’s Aunt Lindas call the New York Times fake news while sharing AI-generated headlines circulated by Russian bots, became especially terrible when the Trumps began using it to drum up outrage and misinformation during the 2016 presidential election. So it would stand to reason that the Trump administration would know better than anyone else not to trust any information found there. But if there’s one thing the Trumps don’t stand for, it’s reason, and therefore, Trump-in-law Jared Kushner seems to be crowdsourcing tips to fight coronavirus from Facebook doctors or at least asking friends to do it for him.
Late Wednesday night, Dr. Kurt Kloss—father to Karlie and father-in-law to Jared Kushner’s brother—asked a Facebook group presumably containing emergency room physicians how they would handle coronavirus “for a friend,” while strongly hinting that friend was Kushner:
“I have direct channel to person now in charge at White House,” Kloss wrote in his post, which generated hundreds of responses. And just in case the other doctors didn’t get that pretty obvious hint, the next morning, Kloss went into the comments to spell it out: Jared Kushner had asked him for recommendations, according to since-deleted posts published by the Spectator.
The Facebook crowdsourcing comes on the heels of coronavirus task force leader Mike Pence appearing to not actually know anything about the virus in a Today show interview. When the people claiming to be doctors on Facebook asked Kloss why Vice President Pence, a man who does not believe condoms prevent sexually transmitted disease, is now making decisions about preventing the spread of a virus instead of a doctor or public health expert, Kloss indicated that he is also less than enthusiastic about America’s new disease czar, Politico reports:
“‘The only thing that gave me any sense of confidence was that Dr. Anthony Faucci [sic] was on that stage,’ responded Kloss, citing the well-respected director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.”
In another post, Kloss claimed Kushner is “now directly involved in the response to this.”
The EM Docs Facebook group is nearly 22,000 members strong, and while Politico notes that members must provide their credentials to join, that’s hardly a comfort from a social media network that all but encourages catfishing by advertisers and seems to have adopted “What is truth anyway?” as an unofficial company motto. But, on the bright side, probably at least a few of these people are real doctors, which means there are more medical professionals working on preventing mass-scale infection than we had before.