WHY MEDICAL DOCTORS
LIE TO THE PUBLIC
June 8, 2021
[Also related: "The REAL Problem with Dr. Fauci"]
Here's why medical doctors who talk to the public LIE to us.
When medical doctors talk to the public they think that they should say whatever it takes to make people do what is best for public health, meaning what best prevents the public health system from being overburdened with people needing ICU beds, etc. But these doctors think that ordinary people don't care about public health; they think they only care about their personal individual health.
Here's what happens. These doctors know that wearing a simple cloth mask does NOT prevent the very small airborne SARS-CoV-2 virus (that causes Covid-19 disease) from passing through it and into the mask-wearer's nose or mouth and infecting the mask-wearer. But they also know that wearing a simple cloth mask DOES prevent the LARGE virus-carrying droplets that come out of the mask-wearer's nose or mouth from going through the mask and entering the air and thereby infecting somebody ELSE.
So, these doctors think to themselves: "If, when I am interviewed by the mass media, I say--truthfully--that the only reason to wear a cloth mask is to protect OTHER people, then lots of people won't wear a mask. But if I say--falsely--that the mask will protect the mask-wearer from being infected then that will cause lots more people to wear a mask. Therefore, I am morally obliged, for the sake of protecting public health, to LIE to the general public by saying that cloth masks protect the mask-wearer."
Likewise, early in the pandemic before lots of cloth masks had been manufactured, doctors lied to the public in saying that cloth masks did nothing useful. Why did they lie? They did this because they didn't want the public to compete with health care workers for the limited supply of good masks. Then later, when lots of cloth masks were available, these same doctors said that it was important to wear them. This had nothing to do with any new scientific knowledge; it was all about manipulating the general public with a lie when it was thought necessary for public health, and then telling the truth later when the lie was no longer useful and was actually counter-productive.
The result of this lying by medical doctors is that people have come to distrust them, very understandably. Now, when the doctors say something that is true and very important, many people ignore them. And this is terrible for both personal AND public health!
The root of this problem is the false notion (as I discuss in detail in "Human Nature: the Capitalist Big Lie") that ordinary people are mostly just selfish, and won't act out of a concern for others. This notion--that people are just selfish--is the fundamental premise of capitalism: that people only work to get as rich as possible, and that the reason capitalism, based on the profit motive, is the best social system is that it is based on the (supposedly) ugly truth about human nature and not on some false idealistic notion that people care about others and will behave altruistically.