The Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB), an authority on medical licensure and the discipline in the United States, recently passed a policy on medical misinformation and disinformation that will guide state medical boards and the health care workers they license and could even “become state law.” What could possibly go wrong?
Like the other obsessive “misinformation” pushes — from Silicon Valley to CNN’s Brian Stelter to the White House — this one once again uses the Covid rationale to legitimize it.
“More than 2 years into this pandemic, the largest threat next to the spread of the virus itself is the spread of disinformation and misinformation,” claimed FSMB’s President and CEO Humayun Chaudhry.
Ah yes, on the list of biggest threats, so-called “misinformation” is right up there next to a virus that reportedly contributed to the deaths of almost 1 million people in our country alone. To tackle this allegedly deadly misinformation, this premier medical licensure board is advising against exemptions for vaccines and “other preventative measures” (read: mask-wearing) and calling on each state board to adopt policies for their licensees’ conduct related to what’s been deemed dis- and misinformation.
In other words, the FSMB is setting up an ideological infrastructure for disciplining physicians who don’t follow the so-called scientific consensus on medical causes, treatment, prescriptions, or advice. It’s reminiscent of the way hospitals treated the hard-working nurses and doctors who looked at the available evidence on the Covid shot and opted not to take it, firing them en masse during what was already a staffing crisis, to the detriment of ailing patients.
This heavy-handed ideological crackdown by the FSMB is an affront not only to science generally but also to everything we’ve learned so far during the Wuhan virus. How many times did Americans hear, after their Covid posts had already been nuked from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, that “the science has changed”? The “trust the experts” refrain from health bureaucrats, the medical establishment, and the media became an echo of “whoopsies” as The Science was proved wrong time and time again.
Remember when we learned that Clorox wiping our groceries and quarantining our library books was all a bunch of bunk because, actually, this airborne virus isn’t transmitted on surfaces? A similar switcheroo happened with almost every single piece of pandemic “consensus.”
For instance, after two years of masking, health experts finally admitted that covering our faces in fabric actually doesn’t stop the spread. After thousands of Americans lost their jobs for refusing to inject an experimental vaccine into their veins, we learned that the real misinformation was coming from the talking heads including the president who said the virus would keep us from getting Covid and spreading it, neither of which was true. And despite health experts telling us lockdowns were worth the risk, the shutdowns’ failure to protect Americans while bankrupting them exposed that short-sighted scientific evaluation as a lie too.
Thanks to Big Tech oligarchs, we got a preview of the efficacy of “misinformation” policies. Most of the content they censored because it contradicted “scientific consensus” turned out to true, with Americans no safer for having had it hidden from their view. How much worse might the consequences be when a course of treatment isn’t just shadowbanned on YouTube but prohibited in the doctor’s office?
But this move by the FSMB also completely ignores massive historical blunders in science, and the ramifications of such a short-sighted ideological purge will far outlast the virus du jour.
Back in the early 1600s, there was a man by the name of Galileo Galilei — maybe you’ve heard of him — famous for observations with his telescope and for crusading for the harebrained idea that the earth rotates each day and revolves around the sun. Much like the health elitists of our day who are convinced that everything revolves around them, the educated folks of Galileo’s day believed the Earth was at the center of the universe. You might have called it a “scientific consensus.”
Galileo’s opponents were so convinced that he was spreading misinformation that he was investigated by the Roman Inquisition of 1615, smeared as a heretic, and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life. Not to spoil the ending, but it turns out actually the Earth does revolve around the sun. Oops, guess the consensus was wrong.
Fast-forward to 1940s America, where the idea of curing mental illness by means of hacking apart the brain’s prefrontal cortex gained scientific steam. Despite major risks, including turning adults into permanent infants and robbing them of personality, self-awareness, and emotion, lobotomies became prevalent enough that some 50,000 people underwent the inhumane surgery in the United States alone, including even President John F. Kennedy’s sister, who was left hardly able to move or speak. Another strike against the inerrancy of scientists.
Or what about the “lobotomy” of 2022, wherein physicians chop off healthy body parts in response to mental illness. Today’s medical elites claim there’s scientific consensus on the benefits of mutilating genitals, sterilizing teens, and administering wrong-sex hormones for people who deny basic biology about the sexes or suffer from gender dysphoria.
Even Joe Biden’s own Assistant Secretary of Health Rachel Levine, who is transgender, has claimed “there is no argument” among physicians specializing in youth and adolescents about “the value and importance of gender-affirming care.” It’s patently false.
The bottom line is that anyone who claims to be a champion of medicine or science but is quick to shut down dissenting theories and flag new evidence as “disinformation” is no scientist at all. By its very definition, science includes observing the natural world and all the available evidence it affords and experimenting on it. This means theories are always changing, especially about novel viruses and experimental treatments.
In these circumstances, anyone who says the science is settled is either a liar or a fool. And short of settled science, there’s no place for politically motivated policies on “misinformation.”
Just ask Galileo. I’m sure he’s home.
Source: The Federalist
