Mac Donald: The Corruption of Medicine

 

Heather Mac Donald is a favorite of mine.  In her most recent column at City Journal, she comments on “The Corruption of Medicine”:

The post–George Floyd racial reckoning has hit the field of medicine like an earthquake. Medical education, medical research, and standards of competence have been upended by two related hypotheses: that systemic racism is responsible both for racial disparities in the demographics of the medical profession and for racial disparities in health outcomes. Questioning those hypotheses is professionally suicidal. Vast sums of public and private research funding are being redirected from basic science to political projects aimed at dismantling white supremacy. The result will be declining quality of medical care and a curtailment of scientific progress.

Virtually every major medical organization—from the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) to the American Association of Pediatrics—has embraced the idea that medicine is an inequity-producing enterprise. The AMA’s 2021 Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity is virtually indistinguishable from a black studies department’s mission statement. The plan’s anonymous authors seem aware of how radically its rhetoric differs from medicine’s traditional concerns. The preamble notes that “just as the general parlance of a business document varies from that of a physics document, so too is the case for an equity document.” (Such shaky command of usage and grammar characterizes the entire 86-page tome, making the preamble’s boast that “the field of equity has developed a parlance which conveys both [sic] authenticity, precision, and meaning” particularly ironic.)

. . .

And so medical schools and medical societies are discarding traditional standards of merit in order to alter the demographic characteristics of their profession.  . . .

Read Ms. Mac Donald’s full article here.  Her sad conclusion: “The guardians of science have turned on science itself.”

Exit question: What criteria would you use to decide on which doctor to choose for your open-heart surgery?

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Ohio’s Vax-a-Million Lottery: FAIL

 

FEE (Foundation for Economic Education) published its report “States Spent At Least $90 Million on Vaccine Lotteries. Studies Show They Accomplished Nothing” at The Washington Gazette. And sadly, their lead-off example is Ohio:

Government bureaucrats aren’t exactly known for spending taxpayer money wisely. Sadly, the pandemic has proven no exception—with new studies showing that local governments wasted millions on vaccine lotteries that accomplished…nothing. 

For example, Ohio implemented a “Vax-a-Million” initiative where it drew weekly lotteries for a $1 million prize among those who got the vaccine. Similar programs have cropped up around the country, such as “VaxCash” in Maryland and “Vax and Scratch” in New York. In all, states spent at least $90 million, likely more, Business Insider reports, on these kinds of vaccine lottery efforts.

Given the significant sums involved, it’s worth questioning: Did these pro-vaccine government initiatives actually accomplish their goals? 

The answer provided by a new study published in JAMA Health Forum is a resounding “no.” Researchers examined the 19 states with vaccine lottery schemes and compared them to states that did not enact such programs. The authors conclude that the impact these lotteries had on increasing vaccination rates was “very small in magnitude and statistically indistinguishable from zero.”

. . .

Read the full report here and weep.  If you are so inclined, send Gov. DeWine a message here to let him know what you think of his initiative - maybe include the hyperlink to the FEE report.

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Mark Steyn on Cancel Culture

 

cartoon credit: michelle-antoinette.com
(click to embiggen or click on the link)

Here’s the conclusion of another excellent column from Mark Steyn:

Going along to get along is killing our society, and the one tiny act that anyone with a modicum of self-respect can perform is refusing to participate. For example, the American Medical Association could try butching up to the standards of nineteen-year-old Elizabeth Heverin of Aberdeen University. Following a campaign led by overseas students to ban the British military from campus, Miss Heverin said:

If the British military makes them feel uncomfortable, why did they come to a British uni?

Then she added, for good measure:

Rule, Britannia!

Young Miss Heverin was promptly banned from all Students Association premises for "discriminatory or racist language", and kicked out of the Politics and International Relations Society for "having a right-wing bias". It's the instant, vicious pettiness of these vile twerps that impresses.

Yet, since the "controversy" broke, a nineteen-year-old student has held firm-ish - or, anyway, more firm than the editor of JAMA or the director of the Royal Botanical Gardens or the chiefs of US Special Operations Command.

And so it spreads . . . from the faculty lounge to the botanical gardens to the general staff to the surgeon in your operating room and the pilot of your plane. Some years ago I wrote:

The dwindling number of sane people in the western world vaguely assume that the politically correct celebrate-diversity nonsense is confined to our increasingly worthless universities or NPR panel discussions. But not so. It's burrowed its way into everything, and is slowly but remorselessly moronizing even vital areas of life.

And some years before that - after a great man, Sir Tim Hunt, had his career vaporized by an utter fraud called Connie St Louis:

So we lose a superb Nobel scientist but keep a third-rate lying mediocrity. My problem with all this is that, increasingly, key levers of society are being ceded to the irredeemably stupid and mendacious, who seem to be the only ones capable of navigating the rocks and rapids of political correctness. One has the uneasy feeling that similar scenarios are playing out every day around the western world. How long before the planes start dropping out of the sky?

Not long now.

Mark Steyn’s full column is here.

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