So governors across the country have decided they know better than health officials how to deal with the threat of an Ebola outbreak.
Well, there we are. We’ve reached a milestone in our nation’s history, and solved a growing medical problem other than Ebola – a shortage of doctors.
No need to worry anymore. Everyone who supports the policies of these governors in regard to an Ebola threat can now move with haste to make the governor of their state their primary care physician.
Why wouldn’t they? By supporting policies health officials insist are not only ineffective, but may make matters worse in the long run, these people are saying they believe politicians know more about medicine than doctors.
In fact, because he is so outspoken about this, I think New Jersey Governor Chris Christie should lead the way. He should ask Governor Andrew Como of New York or Connecticut Governor Dan Malloy to be his primary care physician. Cuomo and Malloy can do the same thing.
After all, all three have decided they know better than the CDC, the Dean of Johns Hopkins University Medical School, the New England Journal of Medicine, and hundreds of other healthcare officials when it comes to an Ebola threat.
Their expertise is stunning, and the public finding out about it couldn’t happen at a better time. There is a general disregard for science afoot in American today. The signs suggest that many of our citizens have decided that experts are not called experts because they know something. They are experts because they don’t know what the average Joe on the street knows.
That’s why they seem to be wrong so much. But not Joe on the street. He’s seldom wrong because opinions can’t be wrong. They just are.
So when Dr. Randy Schekman of the University of California, Berkeley and the 2013 Nobel Prize in medicine winner says, “Science ignorance is pervasive in our society,” with anti-science attitudes “reinforced when some of our leaders are openly antagonistic to established facts,” we should pay no attention to him. After all, he’s just a medical expert.
No, we should listen to people like governors who openly admit they are not experts, but who know some things because they say they do. Who needs “scientific knowledge” to have credibility when it comes to medicine?
And it helps to have a bully demeanor when you’re advocating established opinions that have no evidential support.
Of course, the U.S. once led the world in scientific development and progress. Today we lag behind most western nations, but there’s no need to let that concern us.
We now have politicians with a stunning breath of scientific knowledge, especially in regard to infectious diseases, and the amazing thing is that they know so much without spending a day in medical school.
So from where I sit it looks to me as if we are a very lucky people. While the world looks to Doctors Without Borders for help in fighting Ebola, we have governors.
Our nation has to be the envy of the world.
Jan,
Nicely done, although it is sad that informed people like you must resort to sarcasm to get the attention of the “willfully ignorant” among us. I like the extended conceit that governors and other high level office holders have become de facto experts on virtually everything!
Bill, in two sentences you summed up where we are politically as a nation. Thanks.
I suggest that your “we have governors” be stretched a bit to read “we have politicians”. We currently have several instances of exceptionally ignorant politicians holding elected office. I submit this is a result of highly uninformed voters.
I think the current state of the American electorate is a significant problem for America.