Have you ever read the Hippocratic Oath? It’s the oath doctors take as they actually become “doctors”. It’s solemn and it helps them focus and give care to people who need it.
The oath started in Greece back in the 4th century, BC. It is a code of ethics and it has served doctors and patients well. It has gone through permutations over the years but the ethos of the oath remains similar. Because I went to Chicago Booth, I prefer original sources so here is the first one.
I swear by Apollo the physician, and Asclepius, and Hygieia and Panacea and all the gods and goddesses as my witnesses, that, according to my ability and judgement, I will keep this Oath and this contract:
To hold him who taught me this art equally dear to me as my parents, to be a partner in life with him, and to fulfill his needs when required; to look upon his offspring as equals to my own siblings, and to teach them this art, if they shall wish to learn it, without fee or contract; and that by the set rules, lectures, and every other mode of instruction, I will impart a knowledge of the art to my own sons, and those of my teachers, and to students bound by this contract and having sworn this Oath to the law of medicine, but to no others.
I will use those dietary regimens which will benefit my patients according to my greatest ability and judgement, and I will do no harm or injustice to them.
I will not give a lethal drug to anyone if I am asked, nor will I advise such a plan; and similarly I will not give a woman a pessary to cause an abortion.
In purity and according to divine law will I carry out my life and my art.
I will not use the knife, even upon those suffering from stones, but I will leave this to those who are trained in this craft.
Into whatever homes I go, I will enter them for the benefit of the sick, avoiding any voluntary act of impropriety or corruption, including the seduction of women or men, whether they are free men or slaves.
Whatever I see or hear in the lives of my patients, whether in connection with my professional practice or not, which ought not to be spoken of outside, I will keep secret, as considering all such things to be private.
So long as I maintain this Oath faithfully and without corruption, may it be granted to me to partake of life fully and the practice of my art, gaining the respect of all men for all time. However, should I transgress this Oath and violate it, may the opposite be my fate.
I think that during the Covid crisis, the Hippocratic Oath has been misused. Allow me to explain.
Doctors do not want to see people sick and dying. Who does? They do all they can to stop whatever is ailing people. This is a good sentiment.
However, that sentiment was bastardized during Covid. It turned into “no one can get sick and no one can die”. All sickness and death were unacceptable. That is impossible with a virus, especially one that was manufactured in a Chinese lab. Covid was designed to spread. It didn’t act like a naturally occurring virus, for example, H1N1.
Once we shut the economy down unnecessarily and instituted lockdowns and unnecessary useless mask mandates, getting Covid became like getting a Scarlett letter. You had to act like Prudence in Nathanial Hawthorne’s classic novel and tread lightly along with saying the right thing to your family and friends. It’s as if by catching a fast-spreading virus, you were at fault and failed humanity.
Omicron is changing that as single vaxxed, double vaxxed, triple vaxxed, and quadruple vaxxed people are getting Covid and spreading it. Omicron is helping to wake some people from their illogical slumber.
Pfizer now says they have a “vaccine” for Omicron. The problem is Omicron is killing no one. We don’t need a vaccine, but the government medical complex will approve it in the name of “health”, even though we don’t need it and Pfizer will make a lot more money.
What the doctors failed to realize is that there are opportunity costs to trying to totally shut down a virus. The Hippocratic Oath doesn’t necessarily contemplate opportunity costs.
I think a strong case can be made using the data we have that the harm to society is far greater with the Covid policy we used than if we had not shut down, not done all the lockdowns and mandates, and just let it run its course. Instead, we would have concentrated resources on the vulnerable. Our economy and amount of government debt would have been in better shape and fewer people would have died. Remember, total deaths during Covid aren’t just Covid deaths. How many suicides and drug overdoses were there? How many deaths were caused because people couldn’t get treatment or diagnosis since the medical establishment was shut down for them?
To take this one step further, centralized planning doesn’t work as well as decentralized planning for this type of situation. The central planners need to be “brokers of information” and move it quickly through the system. The decentralized people close to their own breakout need to make the best decisions on the ground that they can while respecting the individual liberty of people.
Fact-checkers out there don’t really check facts. They check the information that comes out and make sure it doesn’t run afoul of official government policy. If it does, it is actively suppressed and killed as fast as the internet will work.
Economist Casey Mulligan tried to illustrate the opportunity costs and public policy failures in a recent lecture. Here is a link to his academic paper on the topic. Here is another that he did on the same topic.
Let’s take it to an extreme. A lot of people are advocating for socialized medicine because of Covid. Those same people advocate for socialized medicine no matter what happens and that’s because they truly don’t understand socialized medicine. There is no “free”. There are always opportunity costs and someone gets stuck with the check. The question boils down to cost/benefit analysis. You can achieve the same benefits that people desire with socialized medicine if you are willing to embrace the free market and topple many institutions and bureaucracies that exist today. It’s hard to get people to think out of the box since that’s the way they always did it.
When you have socialized medicine, the entire system is centrally planned. Essentially, you transfer your individual rights to make decisions based on your own situation to an unelected bureaucracy.
In the extreme you might see policies like this:
You are pregnant with a Down’s kid or kid that will be handicapped, forced abortion since the societal cost will be too high to support that child.
You are very sick after the age of 70 and you are denied medical care for your condition since the average age of death is 78 and most people consume the lion’s share of medical care in the last couple years, particularly the last six months, of life
You want elective surgery to fix something. You take a number and wait. You might never get it. See Canada for evidence of this.
Don’t think those ideas are realistic? Check out what happened yesterday in Boston.
This is a “vaccine” that doesn’t work as advertised. It’s a “vaccine” that doesn’t stop you from getting Covid. It’s a “vaccine” that doesn’t stop you from spreading Covid. It’s a “vaccine” that failed so miserably that the FDA changed the definition of what being vaccinated is.
I am so old I remember when you got a vaccine it meant you didn’t get the disease you were being vaccinated for.
People made fun of the idea of “death panels” being formed back when Obamacare was initially being debated. However, for unelected faceless bureaucracies, that isn’t far-fetched. You don’t think you can be an uncaring totalitarian, but Covid has revealed that a lot of people can be. Snitching on neighbors. Calling the police for gathering in your private home. That stuff really happened, and it happened in the US.
Teacher’s unions flexed their muscles and took a couple of years off. They were paid to Zoom class which is not exactly working for the children. An entire generation of American kids was hurt badly and are continued to be hurt badly by the policies being enforced by the Teacher’s union, and supported by the government bureaucracy. This is intentional and designed to further the economic incentives of the union, not in the best interest of children. Sending your kid to a government run school is dangerous to the future of your child these days and private tech enabled options haven’t innovated fast enough.
If you were a knowledge worker, you might have gotten more production by working from home but it came at a large cost. “Hours worked increased, including a rise of 18% outside normal business hours. Average output declined slightly, thus productivity fell 8-19%.”
As this is being written, 50,000 truckers in Canada are driving to the nation’s Capitol to protest Covid vaccine mandates. The border is closed to unvaccinated American truckers. If you didn’t think supply chains were stressed just wait. The convoy is 30 miles long, and more trucks are joining. Since the ‘70s are back, I put this up.
In Continental Europe, no stranger to totalitarianism, and in many cases people embrace it, we have seen people chased down and beaten by police for the simple act of not wearing a mask…..outside. There is a reason why people left Europe for America and that is a perfect case and point. In the past couple of years, the police have been under a larger threat from getting hurt or killed from ANTIFA or BLM than anything else. Check out my friend Aaron Ginn’s Twitter feed for examples.
Covid has given the totalitarian license to ration and be dictatorial. The collective has been significantly raised over the individual.
The guy says it with a straight face! A box of rocks could do better. This flies in the face of all empirical data regarding vaccines and Covid.
Doctors just doctor and they have failed to understand this. They clung to their Hippocratic Oath and misinterpreted it. Don’t tell me about “official organizations” like the American Medical Association which is just a non-government bureaucracy. The AMA is like a union and restricts care rather than embracing full competition and increasing care.
No one has paid attention to data or science. Recently, we have seen how Fauci tried to suppress and defame anyone who wanted to explore the idea that Covid was created in a lab. He even used his bureaucratic power to dole out “grants”, or you might say payoffs, to influential doctors to shut up. The FDA just shut down monoclonal antibody treatment because of a non-peer-reviewed study that was put out by a competitor to the company that manufacturers monoclonal antibody treatments. It was a political decision not based on science. Mask mandates are not based on science. Staying six feet apart is not based on science. Ventilators actually were bad for many people. Some governors sent elderly Covid patients into nursing homes and killed more people than they should have. The large percentage of edicts and actions by governments over Covid is not based on science but based on fear and politics. That extends to Trump at the outset too. Years from now as historians and economists study the last three years, they will look at it as a total worldwide failure of public policy.
Winston Churchill feared the day when science would be used to tread heavily on the individual liberties of people. We are here. The bureaucracy, with encouragement from legislators, used fear to create incentives to hurt people rather than help them.
In high school and college I didn't understand why we studied history and the humanities. It seemed to just be a recap of significant things and themes from the past. I understood that our elders were saying the reason was, "remember history so as not to repeat it," but was troubled by how that was applied in a useful way.
Things like Germany in the '30's and how fascism came to be so prominent. Things that led to hyperinflation and the destruction of empires. I mean, we know all this now, right? It almost felt like common knowledge. But then there's the humanities, with the themes of human nature. It teaches us that human nature is timeless, and never changes. If we are smart, we will look for it and see it very clearly, and control it.
This past two years has been revealing in that we really haven't changed much. We are in danger of losing all the progress that our ancestors gained at the loss of much treasure and blood. It's as if few people have studied these themes, and they can't see what's in front of them.
I hope we are not doomed, and can recover the ground we have lost.