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Dr. Eileen Natuzzi is one of many healthcare workers who left retirement to help fight COVID-19. The former acute-care trauma surgeon with a master’s in public health went to work for the San Diego County Department of Public Health’s COVID case investigation team, which was tasked with interviewing people who tested positive for the virus.
Natuzzi told Children’s Health Defense Chairman Robert F. Kennedy Jr., on the “RFK Jr The Defender Podcast,” that San Diego County did an “excellent job of pulling together their contact tracing, case investigation, outbreak investigation.”
But when she and her colleagues recommended a different approach to classifying COVID cases, they ran into resistance from the agency.
Natuzzi said:
“The problem with any of these government bureaucracies is they’re trying to turn a Panamanian tanker with a paddle. It’s a slow move, it’s a slow change. It’s as though we took our marching orders from the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and nothing else. So there was a lot of filtering down that came from CDC into the California Department of Public Health, and then down into the county departments of public health.”
Natuzzi told RFK Jr. she lobbied county officials to start classifying COVID cases based on symptoms and their severity rather than reporting total cases. She proposed they categorize the cases as people who had “asymptomatic, mild, moderate or severe disease” as opposed to total cases “which sounds scary.”
Despite having the data, the county didn’t want to do that, said Natuzzi. “We proposed that and there didn’t seem to be any interest in doing it.”
Listen to the full interview to hear Natuzzi and RFK Jr. talk about vaccine shedding, asymptomatic transmission, overly sensitive PCR tests and more.
Listen here:
