More Silencing of Doctors from ‘The Healthy Futures Act’?
At a time when our health system is overwhelmed with a vast variety of diseases caused by the risky Covid jab venture, the government is overhauling the Healthy Futures (Pae Ora) Act which dictates how Health New Zealand is supposed to deliver its services. We think the accidentally sardonic name of this act will go down in history.
An article on the Radio New Zealand website describes alarm about new clause 11A which requires all staff, from CE down, to be “politically neutral”.
It interviews a number of doctors’ leaders, all concerned that the clause is a gag order and who cite various examples from the past where doctors were silenced, including the Lake Alice abuses.
New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out with Science (NZDSOS) is appalled at the hypocrisy of the doctors quoted by Radio New Zealand.
In particular, Luke Bradford from the College of GPs is quoted: “We have to avoid echo chambers. We have to accept that people’s health and wellbeing should not be part of the political seachange – it’s a basic human right. We invest money in training experts to look after it – we should be able to trust we can hear from those experts.”
Well, Dr Bradford, throughout the Covid period concerned doctors were and still are silenced and persecuted for raising legitimate concerns about patient care and offering effective treatments. Your college is at the forefront of that. Medical ethics went down the crapper and trust in doctors with it.
Another, obstetrician Sue Fleming, said doctors should not have to choose between keeping their jobs and keeping patients safe. She is wrong: there should be no choice in the doctor’s mind. Ethics should win every time.
A consultant physician says, with no hint of irony let alone insight, “to suggest that healthcare workers should only support the government of the day has been shown to cost lives”. Avoiding the elephant, she cites past and overseas examples where people had died because of silencing.
We believe all this will deteriorate further under the proposed amendment. We seek clarity regarding the ability of health care workers to raise concerns under any circumstances, including a pandemic rerun. Further, we call upon our colleagues to reflect on the most recent examples of silencing and ethical violations and consider whether they were part of it.
The concept of “political neutrality” could imply that one can criticise government policy rather than merely cheerlead it, although we expect Brown’s intent is the opposite, and his government has been as deaf to critical evidence of harms from the experimental jabs as the last one was.
The term appears to be included, ironically, for political reasons, likely so that future criticism of government policy can be labeled as “political” simply because it is oppositional.
So, the term should be removed, but if not the definition and implications of neutrality must be explicitly clear in the act to prevent misuse, or it will be left to a seemingly politicised judiciary to decide what the politicians intended the wording to mean.
NZDSOS urges a re-evaluation to protect free speech and professional integrity in medicine and, as usual, an immediate suspension of all current and pending gene tech products – if we are to have any hope of a Healthy Future.
This article was originally published by New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out With Science.
