Dr. Do-Little
Allow us a premise. While this is about the medical profession comprised of some of the most outstanding heroes in these times of COVID-19, or at any other time for that matter, there remain a handful of heels and cads there, sustained by their colossal egos, hubris and an astute talent for merging a noble profession with ignoble politics and power plays.
We trusted them with our lives and the lives of our most vulnerable elderly. We surrendered to their wisdom, their medical knowledge and their claims of expertise in the sciences, specifically in epidemiology and public health, both critical and relevant in a pandemic as deadly as COVID-19. This, against the backdrop of the fatal firestorm the pandemic had ignited in an economy and in communities that have not seen the kind of plague that has snuffed out as many lives in so short a time as two quarters in a year we thought was a boom period.
That we feel collectively betrayed by virtual evil as fiction’s Doctors Moreau, Doom, Jekyll, Frankenstein and the prototypical Faustus is an
understatement.
Add the real-life Dr. Josef Mengele, Dr. Jack Kevorkian and any abortionist, or assisted suicide killer. Hannibal Lecter is figuratively among us and he is feeding.
They are the few across the congressional committees investigating scams, scandals and dubious initiatives that compromise public health in favor of vested interests behind what is notoriously known as “Big Pharma.”
Wikipedia defines “Big Pharma” as “shorthand for an abstract entity comprising corporations, regulators, NGO, politicians and often physicians, all with a finger in the trillion-dollar prescription pharmaceutical pie”
These are the conflicted doctors beholden to pharmaceutical conglomerates that fund expensive trips, their consultancies and researches designed to peddle from snake oil to vaccines, medical citations and their golf games,
They are the few across the congressional committees investigating scams, scandals and dubious initiatives that compromise public health.
plus well-appointed luxury garages.
In the pre-COVID-19 years, there was the PhilHealth scandal that saw a Frankenstein beast whose board was half-politician, half-physician. In the deadly Dengvaxia scam, on both sides, one peddled political gimmickry for the 2016 presidential elections, the other, writing on falsities. Yet both were in the payroll of the pharmaceutical giant behind the deadly vaccine.
Never mind the dead children. Those were for a third set to worry about.
In this pandemic, hubris and politics prevail as a virtual Dr. Do-Little is the lead physician.
Simply look at the modeling designed by armchair epidemiologists. It missed all critical points by failing to factor in sociological and behavioral variables and supply chain impacts.
If the public now distrusts the data and analysis provided by these so-labeled experts, it is all their doing. Imagine debating between one wave or two? Imagine declaring that the curve had flattened only to say, “Oops! It was just ‘bent?’”
What curve isn’t bent? Such insensitivity underlies all medical malpractice cases. In contrast to the real medical frontliners, those whispering from the shadows are doing very little to allay our fears.
“Simply look at the modeling designed by armchair epidemiologists. It missed all critical points by failing to factor in sociological and behavioral variables and supply chain impacts.
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