How We Were Betrayed By The Medical Profession

Written by Dr James Allan on April 15, 2024. Posted in Current News

It is important to admit when one has been wrong, and more so when one has been badly wrong

So let me start with myself. I go back to the years before the Covid pandemic.

For a long time, part of my work-related, peer-reviewed legal writings had focused on the failings around the English-speaking world of bills of rights and of the judges – committees of unelected ex-lawyers if we wish to be precise – and, indeed, of the lawyerly caste itself.

And I believed that things were only going to get worse. That was in part due to what was happening in the law schools around the Anglosphere.

Let’s just say that the law schools, and universities more generally, were uncontestably getting more woke while viewpoint diversity was collapsing.

Just look at last year’s Voice referendum and the fact that this country has some three dozen law schools yet the number of law professors across the whole country who came out openly against the proposal could be counted on one hand, one machine operator’s hand in fact.

But the country as a whole voted nearly 61 percent “No”.

In short, I was a fully signed-up member to the well-known sentiment that William Buckley had conveyed some years back when he said that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the Harvard University faculty.

For me, make that also the lawyerly caste that gives us our top judges. Put differently again, I was no great fan of juristocracy or of kritarchy or of lawyers as a group when it comes to driving public policy.

But before 2020 I had been quite a big fan of the doctorly caste. During my seven or eight years on New Zealand’s University of Otago ethics committee, and from interactions more generally, I believed as a general proposition that doctors tended to focus on the evidence.

That they did not tend to over-moralise and then attempt to impose their own moral worldviews on others. That they were better at standing up to groupthink and panic, and certainly better than the lawyerly caste.

They put a hefty weight on individual autonomy, sometimes through the prism of the doctrine of ‘informed consent’ (about which I have grave doubts, as it happens, since 10-plus years of education is really not able to be summed up in a 10-minute little overview so the patient can give ‘informed’ consent – the proper question to the doctor is “what would you do if this were your son?”).

But nevertheless I reckoned doctors valued individual autonomy and a large degree of patient choice.

They also, as an aside of sorts, seemed to me to take a real interest in the arts and literature in a way that is dying out in the universities – including in those parts of our universities supposedly devoted to them such as history, literature, classics, even philosophy and which are dying out in part because the academics who staff them want to deconstruct and woke-ify even their own fields of expertise.

Still, and in summary, I was big fan of doctors and the doctorly caste. I certainly thought that as a group they were better than the lawyers.

And here’s where we come back to my starting claim, the importance of admitting when one has been wrong. Because let’s face it. Boy, was I wrong about doctors!

The pandemic and Covid plainly showed the preponderance of them, as a class, to have been as pusillanimous, panicked and even principleless as the rest of our elites.

Let’s take the risk of having all of our blood pressure readings go through the roof and recall the nearly three years of governmental thuggery, heavy-handedness, imposition of idiotic and often irrational rules and resort to lockdown lunacy – not to mention that those imposing these sometimes inane and often unprecedented public health measures virtually never paid the costs of what they were imposing.

The police heavy-handedness verging on thuggery did not affect them. The school closures that shut down schools in a way that will see many children, especially the poor ones, disadvantaged for life did not much affect them – and under a fortnight ago, in late March 2024, a new study out of Stanford University’s Hoover Institute came out and found that the total cost to the U.S. economy of the educational loss from Covid school closures will be $31 trillion, leave aside that the closures were completely needless and ineffective at preventing Covid transmission.

There will be a proportionally enormous cost here in this country. And don’t forget that Australia’s educational results pre-Covid were already woeful – we scored below Kazakhstan – so it’s not as though we could afford any drops in scores and attainment, let alone precipitous ones.

In addition to the police thuggery and school closures, the people who brought us lockdowns did not pay the costs of devastating the small business sector.

Somehow that seems worse when it is a supposedly Right-of-centre political party doing the devastating of its core constituency in favour of the public service and while fostering an ongoing ‘work from home’ mindset across society that has gutted productivity – no serious person really believes that working from home, in general terms, produces as much as working from the office – and that led to last year’s biggest drop in living standards in this country in decades.

Nor did a single public health type or politician or top bureaucrat take a big pay cut, or even a small one, all while seemingly flipping coins to decide which were, and which were not, essential businesses.

Oh, and let’s not forget that while doing all this they were mouthing the inane, false (but rhetorically effective) phrase “we’re all in this together”, a phrase that was factually wrong on all sorts of levels including poor vs rich, young vs old, and private sector vs public sector.

Basically, the lockdown imposers had no skin in the game, to borrow a phrase from Nassim Taleb. They didn’t bear the costs of their decision-making. If they had, we would have had different, more liberal decisions.

Or what about the sort of massive government spending and increased debt and all the money printing during the lockdown lunacy? These measures effectively – in part via asset inflation – transferred huge wealth from the young to the old and from the poor to the rich.

The pandemic years were the best years ever to be a billionaire. Again, the decision-makers had no skin in the game. Or what about, in a comparative blink of the eye, throwing away everything I had ever heard about the importance of informed consent during my years on a university ethics committee in order to push vaccine mandates?

All in all, these years amounted to “the biggest inroads on our civil liberties in at least 200 years”, to paraphrase the retired U.K. Supreme Court judge Jonathan Sumption.

Which takes us back to doctors. The pandemic response was largely brought to you by public health types and by modellers. Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson was the modeller who years earlier had given us modelled predictions as regards BSE (‘mad cow disease’) and foot-and-mouth disease that massively overestimated everything – by orders of magnitude.

This was well-known at the start of the Covid pandemic. Yet it made no difference at all to the British and American Governments’ willingness to treat Professor Ferguson’s forecasts wholly unsceptically and almost as holy writ.

Apparently hugely overestimating what the actual deaths will turn out to be, however repeatedly, does not affect one’s career as a fêted epidemiological modeller one iota; it seems, in fact, to bolster one’s position and burnish one’s credentials.

Perhaps, though, if instead of overestimating actual outcomes by orders of magnitude you were to underestimate by just one death, well then we’d see some ramifications.

I need also to mention the incredible inroads into free speech and the marketplace of ideas during the pandemic.

Censorship, shadow bans, social media blackouts, the legacy press operating more as a latter-day Pravda running the lockdownista line on everything and without even a hint of a trace of a soupçon of an echo of scepticism and questioning as regards that day’s offerings from the public health cadre and Government ministers.

Heck, I even had a couple of published, peer-reviewed law articles offering a sceptical view of the pandemic response rejected for listing by SSRN (presumably because only public health types were then deemed suitable to comment on this fiasco, and only lockdown cheerleader ones at that).

Or consider the vitriolic response to anyone who suggested that the virus that was found a few hundred yards from the front door of a lab doing research on just this sort of virus – the only known one in that country – might, just might, have actually escaped from that lab. Mirabile dictu!

Instead, charges of ‘racism’, were the accepted line or response from our elites, along with mocking anyone who suggested this as the source. Even a former head of MI5 asserting the lab leak theory was censored and banned on social media.

Or remember how the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration were treated by their university colleagues, by the press, by social media. Mr. Fauci called these three “fringe epidemiologists”, although one day before the pandemic started Professor Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University would have been widely picked as the world’s most eminent epidemiologist.

And the other two would have made the top 10 list, those two being Professor Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University and Professor Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University (then, not now, as Harvard recently fired him for being right about everything).

During the frenzied panic and demand for conformity of the lockdown mania years even the most credentialled people in the world were censored, shadow banned and threatened with losing their jobs if they proffered an opinion outside the Government and public health line.

So much for any concern about free speech!

Gosh, it was even a political party with the name ‘Liberal’ and a Prime Minister Morrison that to their eternal shame offered up the first iteration of the free speech suppressing and truly woeful ACMA Bill, the one that uses the bogus notions of misinformation and disinformation to try to set up a privileged set of people who will tell us what is and is not true – despite the fact that Professor Bhattacharya maintains to this day that the biggest source of disinformation throughout the pandemic was government.

These are bleak times for freedom of expression.

This is taken from a long document. Read the rest here dailysceptic.org

Header image: The Conversation

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