Dr. Mona Mahboubi Lecture

Dr. Mona Mahboubi, an alumna of EA, died at a young age of breast cancer when she was a member of the Infectious Disease Department at Georgetown University. This year was the first of the Global health and Pediatric infectious Disease Annual Lecture to celebrate her. I spoke at the memorial service for Mona, but I could not attend the first Lecture in her name at Georgetown so the family sent me the video of the lecture.

Dr. Paul Offit, Infectious Disease Physician at CHOP, was the first lecturer.  He was introduced as the Taylor Swift of Infectious Disease and was instrumental in dealing with the Covid crisis that faced the world in general and our nation in particular. His lecture was about the things that he would do differently when interfacing with colleagues and the American public during the Covid Crisis. Three billion people got the vaccine for Covid.

The focus of his remarks was how difficult it was to communicate the importance of the vaccine to the public. The lecture included charts which were helpful in understanding the various explanations of changes in what the vaccines could or could not do. The general public assumes when they are vaccinated that they interpret this as though they will never get the disease, but this disease was very different than such as the Salk Vaccine. The various Covid vaccinations could only prevent serious illness or hospitalization.

We are aware of how Trump could just not understand the nature of the disease or what vaccines can do. Biden also made a comment that we need to be vaccinated because it was a breakthrough for the Covid disease. You may recall that Dr. Ashish Jha was a spokesman for the CDC and had to follow Biden’s declaration with a statement from the science community that there wasn’t the data to support President Biden’s statement.

In essence, there was conflict within the science community as well as between Washington and the general public. It was a messaging nightmare. This led the American people to not trust anything that was being said by politicians or scientists.

One of Offit’s key points was that science should have drilled home that there is a “fluidity” in science based in new discoveries. Congress and the American people were looking for absolutes which would not change from new discoveries. That was a key understanding that was never adequately addressed.

One of my mantras that you have seen on my blogs is “learn to fail or fail to learn.” Dr. Offit put it another way in dealing with science that by its very nature is use to evolving to make things better. Offit said that people couldn’t understand that “it is OK to be wrong” if you know that you are in an ever-evolving knowledge base. We want black and white, but science particularly with vaccines works in the area of gray. Not only were vaccinations being updated but they were also racing to handle the next strain.

There was one humorous statement that Offit offered as he saw what happened with Dr. Fauci being questioned by various committees in Congress. He was called to be questioned by the Republicans on what went wrong with all the problems with communicating with the public. You may recall Ron Paul’s constantly berating scientists for their lies which were really more a reflection of new learning by the scientists. Offit’s lawyer indicated that he would be glad to do that but please know that he will also want to speak about the necessity of National Health Care which is a topic that Republicans never want to discuss so suddenly they didn’t need his perspective.

I know that Mona would have been pleased with this first annual address of a lecture series in her honor and memory. I spoke the following at her memorial service:

“Mona is an Episcopal Academy graduate who is defined by the word “frontier.” We think of frontiers as on the edge of a settled part of a country or, in Mona’s case, it also means to seek the outer limits of knowledge and achievement.

It stands to reason that she chose a quotation of Louis L. Amour, an American novelist of western frontier stories, for her Episcopal Academy Senior Yearbook page. Her chosen quotation from him reads, “the trail is the thing, not the end of the trail. Travel too fast and you miss all you are traveling for…”

Just as science is fluid and takes physicians down different trails of inquiry, some are truth waiting to be found. Mona knew the trail, the research, was to be traveled slowly so she would not miss what she was traveling for. That’s why she chose to walk everywhere that she went as well to literally walk a trail.