Imagine the career-lifespan of a doctor who didn’t want to treat AIDS patients, because he didn’t want to “get the gay on him”. Or a surgeon who refused to operate on a motorcycle crash victim: “they’re only organ donors, anyway”.
On the other hand, liberal Hollywood has repeatedly treated us to saccharine portrayals of black and/or lefty doctors who nobly set aside their prejudices to treat neo-Nazis or Klansmen. Aw, aren’t they gracious and honourable?
Not any more, it seems.
When Victorian President of the AMA Dr Roderick McRae said that “anti-vaxxers” should withdraw themselves from the public hospital system and “let nature run its course” – he wasn’t only violating the sacred Hippocratic Oath, he was echoing sentiment in the wider community.
There is no question that McRae should immediately resign his position. Australia cannot have a medical professional offering policy advice to state governments with this kind of commentary on the record. Healthcare is a right paid for by the Medicare Levy – not a weapon in the war for medical compliance.
But the grim truth is that a significant section of the medical community has been inching further on this slippery slope for decades. First, they came for the smokers…
Certainly, the campaign against smoking was a massive public health success. If only they’d known when to stop. Having got a taste for bossing we plebs about, a certain breed of stethoscope-toting bully got hooked on the power-rush of telling the hoi polloi what to do. Suddenly, they’re telling us what we can and can’t eat or drink.
Then, they started to get nasty. In 2006, primary care trusts in the UK began announcing that they were taking smokers off their elective surgery lists.
The CCP virus has supercharged the vindictive streak nascent in far too many doctors.
Australia has a terrible infection festering inside its culture which praises the idea of leaving those who refuse to comply with collective government health directives to die […]
Once you head down the path of medical coercion, there is no limit to the depravity of science when it becomes fixated on an outcome – in this case, vaccination percentage. There are plenty of terrible actions justifiable through cold statistics that remain impermissible on ethical grounds.
Remember: the single largest professional group to join the Nazi party were doctors. Of course, many professionals joined the Party more or less reluctantly, out of a sense of self-survival — but doctors were early and disproportionately enthusiastic adopters of Nazi ideology. Doctors in Germany took lead roles in ridding the Reich of “mental defectives”, the handicapped, homosexuals — and Jews. So many German doctors participated in Nazi crimes that the Allies held a separate “Doctors’ Trial” at Nuremberg.
As for the AMA, they have shown themselves to be a political institution. In 2019, they joined the American Medical Association, British Medical Association, and Doctors for the Environment by declaring Climate Change a “health emergency”.
Bad weather kills people, but there isn’t a single documented case of genuinely unusual climate change-driven, murderous weather. Declaring a non-existent problem to be a health emergency while advocating the denial of healthcare to genuinely ill patients tells you everything you need to know about the AMA.
The Good Sauce
If nothing else, we live in an age of “rights”. Not just life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but everything, from housing and food to high-speed internet, is now a “right”.
Here’s the thing about rights, though: they are absolute. If something is contingent upon permission from an authority, it’s not a right, it’s a privilege.
The only conclusion we can draw from the AMA’s Victorian president — should it surprise anyone that such medical authoritarianism should arise in Daniel Andrews’ Victoria? — is that certain doctors and politicians have decided that bodily autonomy is no longer a right. It’s a “privilege”, to be given or taken away, as they see fit, by our “betters”.
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