The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Trust the Health Experts!

Posted on | May 18, 2020 | 1 Comment

 

Last week, I was shocked to hear that Los Angeles was planning to be on coronavirus lockdown until August. Even if that was your plan, why would you announce more than two months of onerous restrictions so far in advance? Just extend it by two weeks now, see what happens and, if the number of new cases doesn’t meet your target, keep adding two-week extensions until you’re satisfied with the numbers. But no — August!

Trying to process this information was difficult, and then yesterday, Instapundit informed me that the person in charge of coronavirus policy Los Angeles is a former high-school principal who got a Ph.D. in Social Welfare from Brandeis. “Doctor Ferrer” is not a medical doctor, and has no real scientific expertise. She got her bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a major in “Community Studies.” A few years ago, when she served as executive director of Boston’s Public Health Commission, “Doctor Ferrer” was featured in a CBS News program as an expert in — wait for it — teen dating violence.

Is she really the person you want running your epidemiology operations?

This business of credentialed “experts” claiming authority to run our lives has become intolerable, and the promotion of such phony expertise has become a disgrace to the profession of journalism:

Everyone in the media was horrified last month when Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp announced he would begin reopening the state’s economy. An April 21 headline in The Week denounced Kemp’s reckless “experiment,” and on April 22, MSNBC bemoaned the Republican governor’s “dangerous gamble.” Dana Milbank of the Washington Post declared: “Public health experts fear coronavirus will burn through Georgia like nothing has since William Tecumseh Sherman.” The Atlantic’s Amanda Mull went so far as to call Kemp’s move an “experiment in human sacrifice.” Yet perhaps the most memorable media condemnation of Kemp was from Ron Fournier, former Washington bureau chief for the Associated Press, who proclaimed on Twitter: “Mark this day. Because two and three weeks from now, the Georgia death toll is blood on his hands. And as Georgians move around the country, they’ll spread more death and economic destruction.”
Well, everyone did mark the day and, after Fournier’s “two or three weeks” elapsed, they called attention to how badly wrong his prediction had been. . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.




 

Category: American Spectator, California, Georgia, Health Care

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One Response to “Trust the Health Experts!”

  1. Friday Links | 357 Magnum
    May 22nd, 2020 @ 10:30 am

    […] from The Other McCain – Trust the Health Experts! The photo of the “health expert” is classic. And a little […]