An Open Letter to the Cleveland Clinic CEO Dr. Tomislav Mihaljevic On Covid-19 Resistance

April 23, 2021

Dr. Tomislav Mihaljevic

President and CEO

Cleveland Clinic

9500 Euclid Avenue

Cleveland, Ohio  44195

SECOND OPEN LETTER TO DR. TOMISLAV MIHALEVIC

Dear Dr. Mijaljevic:

Because of space restraints, I was not able to convey the totality of my thoughts on Cleveland Clinic’s less-than-total response to the COVID-19 vaccination challenge,  so I am writing a second letter today.

In addition, since I sent out my open letter of April 18,  I have received informed and useful feedback from the media – not just the local media, but from the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal as well – talking about the evolving vaccination situation and discussing the questions that they need to have answered by your hospital and others nationwide as the vaccination drive appears to be foundering. Perhaps your hospital can choose to lead the national discussion?

A lot of these questions seem to be about what happens in the next pandemic. If we are so busy telling ourselves that we’re doing a good job this time, and we’re actually not, what will happen the next time? Are we preparing for the future? Or will the country’s major medical entities once more be left out of a leading role in the response when it comes to vaccinating the nation?

I’ll try to outline these media concerns, both local and national, in bullet points as follows:

1.      Is there a “Brain Trust” in Northeast Ohio that is figuring out how to address our local failure to achieve COVID-19 herd immunity in the region.

I look at the budget of the Cleveland Board of Public Health and see an annual amount of just $21 million and 180 full and part time employees. I look at Cleveland Clinic and see annual revenues of $8 billion and 68,000 employees nationwide.  It’s an open and shut question of which entity has the greater resources to solve a pandemic.

I look to see who Cleveland Clinic is partnering with, and the only published answer I see if that they are partnering on PR outreach with the Mayo Clinic, which is based not in Ohio but in Minnesota. Of course this is a very prestigious connection, but it does not relate too  much to the patients at Cleveland Clinic’s 11 NEO facilities, which is the bulk of your patients. Who are you partnering with locally?

Is there a brain trust running the NEO response to the pandemic, and if not, shouldn’t there be? I hear all the time from Gov. DeWine making unwise decisions such as reopening the Cedar Point Amusement Park for the summer, but I don’t see any coverage of major local hospitals leading the charge to reach herd immunity – except for when I see the occasional talking heads in the legacy media. And that’s an inadequate response to the problem of how many people are refusing or ignoring the COVID-19 vaccine that is necessary for herd immunity.

2 .  Is the Cleveland Clinic targeting, targeting one-to-one its own patients who are not vaccinated? Does it even have a way to do so?

I know from own my experience as a patient of Cleveland Clinic over the past year that no one has reached out to try and get me vaccinated. I don’t even recall any email pleas.  Shouldn’t there have been some, and shouldn’t you plan for a better outreach for the next pandemic?

Instead, I find that the health facility that I go to in Lakewood doesn’t even offer the vaccine, even though it is a three-story building taking up a full block. Nor do three other Cleveland Clinic facilities.

After a long wait, I ended up going to my local CVS. But does that CVS have a way to report to my hospital that I have gotten the vaccine? Or is Cleveland Clinic flying totally blind by not even knowing which of its patients has gotten the vaccine?

Shouldn’t Cleveland Clinic be targeting its own patients with the vaccine? Shouldn’t your doctors be on the phone to their patients?

Are we planning on letting drug stores and lead the vaccination charge in the next pandemic, or are we making plans for a better response?

In plainer English, why am I going to the effin’ drugstore for treatment when I am a patient of the second best hospital chain in the nation?

3.     Is Cleveland Clinic, or any NEO brain trust, targeting the groups that we know are vaccine resistant, or are all the local major medical facilities acting like a herd of cats and just going off on their own?

Just from my reading of the media, I can tell that we have identified groups of people who are resistant to getting vaccinated.  Forty nine percent of Republican men are not going to get the vaccine. According to the Washington Post today, 50% of Methodists are not going to get the shot.  I read in the Washington Post about the Los Angeles Dept. of Health making plans to reach out to these people, but I do not see a coordinated TARGETED outreach in Cleveland to the vaccine resistant.

Everyone who wants to get the shot has already gotten it or has made plans to, so at this point we are down to individual arm-twisting. This is not a position hospitals have been in before. What are your hospital’s plans to reach out proactively?

For example, I was sitting on a park bench on W. 117th St. the other day and a young black woman on her bike rode up and sat down on the other bench.  I asked her if she had been vaccinated.  She said no, she had heard bad things about it.  It may be that she does not get her information from legacy media, like Parade Magazine or CBS This Morning.

She said she lived at W. 98th St. That’s where the Cudell Recreation Center is.  Are there any plans by Cleveland Clinic or some brain trust of Cleveland’s largest medical entities to hold a clinic there, blanketing the neighborhood with flyers, sticking a flyer in every door, and even going door to door in person to sign people up? (Lots of unemployed Census takers out there available to do this.)

Because at this point, I think that is what it is going to take.

Sales studies show that it takes an average of 8 contacts in order to “close a sale.” Is there some coalition that is out there figuring out how we can close the COVID-19 vaccine sale, or have we silently admitted that we will never reach herd immunity in Cleveland?

(By the way, all of the local Starbucks have their dining rooms shut down, and these would be the perfect place for some smaller clinics, depending on location.)

4.     Has the doctor-patient bond been thrown out the window by this pandemic?

Typically when there is a major medical problem, it is your family doctor who handles it.  In this situation, the family doctor seems to have been taken out of the equation, and we have let drugstores, health boards and pop-ups to do the heavy lifting.  Is this on purpose? Do we have plans to change this for the next pandemic?

I guess what I am saying is that in Northeastern Ohio, the groups with the most resources to make the COVID-19 vaccine drive a success, the very strong local hospital chains, are the ones doing the least. They seem totally passive, leaving it up to understaffed and underfunded local health boards who simply do not have the resources to solve the vaccine-resistance problem.

5.     What is the Cleveland Clinic’s special obligation as a non-profit that doesn’t pay taxes to the local community?

Looking on the Internet, I find this information about the Cleveland Clinic:

“Cleveland Clinic is a nonprofit organization. All revenues beyond expenses are reinvested in our mission. We care for the organization as if it were our home, by securing its financial health, using resources mindfully and bringing our services to as many people as need our care.”

Given this goal, how should Cleveland Clinic, as a non-profit, be reaching out in an extra-ordinary way to the community that it serves during this pandemic differently than a for-profit organization? This is a question that local journalists are particularly interested in.

Tomislav, this is the next wave of questions you will be receiving from the media, both local and national, on the vaccination drive in the future.  It is my hope that your organization, recently voted as the second best hospital chain in the nation, will step forward proactively with some answers to these questions. A joint PR campaign to the legacy media with the Mayo Clinic is simply an inadequate response to the problem of vaccine resistance, if that is the totality of your efforts. You need to be hands-on, which requires thinking out of the box.

How will we respond differently to the next pandemic? How will Cleveland Clinic change its response?

Sincerely,

Jeff Barge

1326 W. 116th St.

Cleveland, Ohio 44102

Cc:     Chris Quinn

           Julie Washington

           Elizabeth McIntyre

           Elizabeth Sullivan

           Sam Allard

           Ian Rubin

           Monica Robins

            Adam Miller

            Mike McIntyre

            Laura Johnston

            Gov. Mike DeWine