Should doctors manage the pandemic? No, says French philosopher
by Michael Cook | 15 Aug 2020 |
Earlier this year the coronavirus pandemic caught Bernard-Henri Lévy, France’s rock-star public intellectual, overseas. He had been reporting on the plight of Lesbos, the Aegean island crowded with refugees from Syria, and then of Bangladesh, which was attempting to cope not only with Covid-19 but also Islamic extremism, hundreds of thousands of Royhingya refugees, climate calamities and extreme poverty.
Much to his surprise, Lévy did not receive a pat on the back and a cheery “bien joué, BHL!” for highlighting these crises. (He expected them — BHL is not renowned for his modesty.) Instead he felt, at first, “icy indifference” and then the hot breath of social media critics who savaged him for not sheltering in place in solidarity.
There is something mad about this pandemic, Lévy thought, if “solidarity” fails to include Bangladeshis. This callous attitude suggests, he writes in his provocative little book, The Virus in the Age of Madness, that jabber about global solidarity is just “emissions of goodness gases purporting to crown the planet with a halo of sacrifice and abnegation”.
Health professionals get a drubbing BHL’s little book – although he would call it a healthy dose of realism. They are not supermen and superwomen.
First of all, they are not necessarily better informed than laymen. “Doctors know, as did French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, that the ‘scientific truth’ we implore them to deliver is never more than a ‘corrected mistake.’”
Second, the medical “community” is a myth. It “is no more communitarian than any other, that it is riven with fault lines, divergent sensibilities and interests, petty jealousies, esoteric disputes, and, of course, fundamental differences.”
Third, in the past a concern for “hygiene” has become eugenics. “Everyone also knows that there is a doctrine of hygienics that goes something like this: health becomes an obsession; all social and political problems are reduced to infections that must be treated; and the will to cure becomes the paradigm of political action. And no one is ignorant of the fact that the effects of that doctrine can be horribly perverse.”
Finally, using his credential as a philosopher, BHL draws on Plato. In one of his dialogues, the Statesman, the Greek philosopher asks whether doctors should be entrusted with the care of the state – an iatrocracy. “Socrates decides otherwise. Politics, he says, is an art that, since the retreat of the gods, deals with a chaotic, changing world, swept by storms and rudderless. But, in a storm, what is the point of a Hippocratic nosology of ‘cases’? Do not the difficult times call instead for citizen-guardians possessing the audacity and strength to think through, carve into stone, and proclaim legal ‘codes’?”
Michael Cook is editor of BioEdge
Russia has dashed across the finish line and seized the trophy for being the first nation to release a vaccine for Covid-19. It has been nicknamed “Sputnik 5”, recalling the Soviet Union’s glorious triumphs in the Space Race of the 1950s and 60s.
Scientists and bioethicists around the world, and even in Russia, have grave misgivings. Sputnik 5 has not even completed Phase 3 clinical trials. If the Russian vaccine is ineffective or unsafe, it could deter many people from being inoculated with an effective vaccine when it arrives.
By one of those awful coincidences which sometimes happen with new products, Sputnik 5 is being trialled at the same time as a Russian movie which is also called “Sputnik”. This, however, is a horror film about a guest which returns from outer space with an unlucky cosmonaut. It turns out to be a slithering extraterrestrial parasite which feasts on human brains. (Rated 90% on Rotten Tomatoes).
Is there a translation for Murphy’s Law?
Michael Cook
Editor, BioEdge
Scientists and bioethicists around the world, and even in Russia, have grave misgivings. Sputnik 5 has not even completed Phase 3 clinical trials. If the Russian vaccine is ineffective or unsafe, it could deter many people from being inoculated with an effective vaccine when it arrives.
By one of those awful coincidences which sometimes happen with new products, Sputnik 5 is being trialled at the same time as a Russian movie which is also called “Sputnik”. This, however, is a horror film about a guest which returns from outer space with an unlucky cosmonaut. It turns out to be a slithering extraterrestrial parasite which feasts on human brains. (Rated 90% on Rotten Tomatoes).
Is there a translation for Murphy’s Law?
Michael Cook
Editor, BioEdge
NEWS THIS WEEK
by Michael Cook | Aug 15, 2020
President Putin says that one of his daughters has been inoculatedby Michael Cook | Aug 15, 2020
Different bioethics for different countries?by Michael Cook | Aug 15, 2020
Almost 9 out of 10 who do late-term abortionsby Michael Cook | Aug 15, 2020
Let elephants go free, but keep ‘blasphemers’ locked upby Michael Cook | Aug 15, 2020
Now it’s Japanese and Chinese who are the exploitersby Michael Cook | Aug 15, 2020
Bernard-Henri Lévy, France’s rock-star public intellectual, has harsh words for health professionalsby Xavier Symons | Aug 15, 2020
A biased picture of progressive illness may cloud people’s views on euthanasia. BioEdge
L1, Unit 7, 11 Lord Street · Botany, NSW 2019 · Australia
Phone: +61 2 8005 8605
Mobile: 0422-691-615
.png)
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario