What about your Hippocratic oath?
What an irony, that the country that regularly produces some of the greatest discoveries and innovations in the sciences, houses the greatest centers of learning, can lay legitimate claim to producing the largest number of Nobel laureates in this arena, also is home to people who believe the world is flat, the moon landing faked, vaccines kill people and now — that Covid is a hoax and that mandating masks in public is an assault on their personal freedoms. Social media is abuzz with videos and memes of lay people making absolute fools of themselves protesting against the horrors that come from wearing masks.
But doctors who don’t follow the science??
This is where I believe Trump has done us a service. By laying bare just how riven asunder this land is by our politics, where it even trumps (no pun intended) rational thinking and science.
In recent weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to have passing discussions with a couple of Trump supporting doctors on the subject of just how pernicious Covid can be. They are both senior and respected physicians, with considerable influence on the community’s perception of health issues, leaving me distressed and aghast about how they are using their influence.
The first propounded that Covid was not much worse than a ‘bad flu’. While I’m not a physician, I can do some basic math. Some gentle questioning went unanswered when I asked how you compared a disease with a CFR (case fatality ratio) of anywhere from 0.5% to 1%, with the flu which has a CFR of 0.1%. Especially when we don’t have a vaccine to reduce the number of people potentially getting infected. With the flu, typically around 40 million people are infected each year and about 40,000 die. With Covid, it’s quite possible that up to 60% of the population (or around 180 million) will get infected, and of those 900,000 will die. Does that potential death toll of around 22 times qualify as just a ‘bad flu’? Oh, by the way, we’re well on track to hit this number given that we’ve already seen around 125,000 deaths with an extrapolated infected number of around 20 million today.
The second encounter was with the other of the pair. Who has chosen to abjure social distancing throughout this crisis, meeting regularly with multiple families and exhorting others to join them even as the pandemic raged, the CDC cautioned against socializing, and other doctors who are actually experts in the field of epidemiology railed against disregarding the warnings. This doctor actually chose to publicly mock me for my caution at an outdoor social gathering recently, as I maintained my distance from others while she partied like this was 2019.
Of course, neither of them believes in wearing masks, and are actively encouraging people to treat Covid just like a ‘regular’ viral infection and not bother with masks either. Are they not reading the same science that many of us are? Can they not do the basic math I laid out above? Have they not learnt that even amongst survivors, the effects of Covid can be ruinous in the long run?
How would they feel if they knew that their callous disregard for the science and data led their friends to throw caution to the winds, contract Covid, and potentially die or undergo a serious health crisis? I understand the struggle that policy makers have to balance saving lives vs livelihoods, but doctors I believe have a single-minded purpose.
What happened to their Hippocratic oath?
