Casey Chalk writes for the Federalist about credibility challenges facing the nation’s public health establishment.
“The actions of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are endangering the health of the nation,” declared six former U.S. surgeons general appointed by every Republican and Democratic president since George H.W. Bush in a[n] Oct. 7 op-ed at The Washington Post.“The profound, immediate and unprecedented threat that Kennedy’s policies and positions pose to the nation’s health cannot be ignored,” the surgeons general declared. Whatever the merits of such criticisms of RFK, its alarmism is undermined by decades of the medical establishment wantonly kowtowing to harmful policies promoted by leftist ideologues.
It would be easier to countenance such admonitions if this isn’t precisely what the American medicine and scientific establishment has done when it comes to abortion, transgenderism, or the Covid pandemic.
Though the American medical establishment was historically opposed to abortion, in 1970, the American Medical Association formally reversed its earlier position on abortion and voted in favor of legal abortion. Was this because of overwhelming evidence overturning scientific consensus regarding life in the womb being uniquely human, or analysis that abortions would not result in negative consequences for the women who underwent the procedures? Of course not. …
… The story is strikingly similar when it comes to transgenderism, a movement that was all but peripheral — and even deemed a mental disorder by medical professionals — until the last decade-and-a-half. …
… We need spend little time remembering the unscientific, patronizing and erroneous advice and dictums issued from the medical and scientific establishment regarding the coronavirus during the pandemic. Social distancing, masks, school and business closures — almost all of it was unnecessary. These totalitarian measures saved relatively few lives, cost our nation trillions of dollars, and imperiled the educational and social development of an entire generation.
