Ignoring Trolls is Itself Censorship
My current EM News column on the thought police in medicine.
I can’t print the full text here yet, but I hope you’ll follow the link and share this piece. There has been far too much censorship in medicine and I’m weary of the thought police. Or maybe “The Thought Docs…”
Please share widely.
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https://journals.lww.com/em-news/Fulltext/2023/05000/Ignoring_Trolls_is_Itself_Censorship.3.aspx
Ed- good thoughts as usual but anrguably incomplete, at least contextually. Nobody should have been had their jobs threatened per se by espousing skepticism or nuance. And surprisingly the debate , as it were, did not break down conveniently along exclusively party lines. Both political parties exploited this at different times, yes there were goldbricking teachers in New York and yes there was fraud with pandemic bailout of businesses . That said, when it comes to plain vaccine deniers, or spreading absolute falsehoods to back them up, that creates a public health problem. Even crisis. You are probably close enough to the hi risk age group that without a vaccine, you , as a front line doc, had a not rare chance of dying from Covid, and A pretty good chance of getting long Covid. Those MDs who were over the top, and there were relatively few but not rare and quite public, represent clear public health the risks to you and I. The reality is Its pretty likely the virus originated in the wuhan viral lab, that the vaccine is utterly safe on a population basis , certainly compared to vaccines everyone routinely gets for entrance to school health care employment or the military, and that masks actually do work to lower transmission, and certainly severity in some settings for hi risk people.You’d think Covid has gone away and why not given the administrations pronouncement that it’s no longer a factor in their minds. Nothing to see here droids, Time to move on. But Covid is so inconvenient isn’t it? It’s bad for business, right ?. you and I know the incidence remains higher than it was about year ago, and hi risk people are still dying in appreciable numbers. No it’s not ‘just another flu’,and when MDs start spouting that nonsense, what is one to do? Without professional chastisement, at least with denunciation if not disenfranchisement, we will doubtlessly enter the next pandemic with fewer people believing in vaccination or even scientific medicine. The next pandemic, like the next recession , is unavoidable, only a matter of time …while people are working remotely, they are not traveling for leisure virtually, quite the contrary. These voices at times , while not numerous are loud and indefatigable, and any professional credibility they achieve is dangerous to anyone over 65, under 6 months, cancer survivors , dialysis patients and the immunosuppressed. By my calculus that’s well over 20 million citizens. It’s one thing to exclude these hi risk groups from football games, concerts, etc , it’s quite another to make it unsafe for them to fly safely on a plane, go grocery shopping , go to the hospital, etc because young and healthy people have been led to believe its ‘all clear’ , and wont tolerate mask wearing equine nets anywhere . Our inability to implement mask wearing in certain hi risk venues now is directly a consequence of the tolerance imbedded at least inchoately with ‘tolerant’ commentary. . Sure vaccines are not 100 per cent effective, and the vaccine has some side effects, and masking outdoors does not offer material benefits to the risks for hi risk populations, but you’d hardly know that. We don’t need tolerance when science and public health are being attacked. You can’t just say masks are ‘not so effective’ without also saying they are materially beneficial to hi risk groups in certain indoor public venues. Intellectual tolerance has us paralyzed from implementing data based highly reasonable health measures to protect a major part of our population from serious illness. The parallels between gun regulation are as obvious as they are painful….if a doc insists publicly that semi automatic rifles don’t pose a public health danger, or that masks in hi risks ventures useless while Covid is endemic, those are just scientifically wrong, and they should be denounced publicly. We can argue over the merits or feasibility of gun control and masks, but not countenance denial from professional educated colleagues. This is not as fine a line as some, even you, seem to suggest.