“A mode of thinking people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ striving for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action. Groupthink refers to a deterioration of mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment that results from in-group pressures.”
– Irving Janis, Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes
Ascribing what follows to groupthink is actually probably far more generous than these people deserve, even if it’s a factor; the paramount ones are greed, depravity and hubris.
Related: WHO Accuses Anti-Vaxxers of ‘Anti-Science Aggression,’ Calls Them ‘Killing Force’
Via STAT News (emphasis added):
“For public health agencies across the country, the Trump administration has meant taking blow after destabilizing blow. Covid-19 pandemic dollars were pulled. States like Minnesota and cities like Austin cut jobs that had been federally funded. Research grants were canceled in the name of excising diversity programs.
Against that backdrop, public health experts gathered this week at George Washington University in Washington for an annual event called National Public Health Week, now in its 30th year.”
Look at these heifers: at least six out of the seven experts on their way to their National Public Health Week orgy — to whom we are expected to look for health advice — in this shot are either overweight or clinically obese.
Why won’t the rabble pay these heifers the respect they so fervently insist they’re due?
You’ll be shocked to learn the culprit is “disinformation” and “conspiracy theory.”
Continuing:
““I find it ironic that we are talking about the progress that public health has made, given where we are, given the active work to undo what we did,” said Brian Castrucci, an epidemiologist who is president and CEO of the public-health-focused de Beaumont Foundation. “We’ve wiped out smallpox. We’ve ended disease. We used to invest in science and fund the people who delivered this for us. We were on the path to being the healthiest nation. And now we’re not.”
Castrucci pointed his finger at people in the federal government.
“We advance conspiracy theorists over people who are scientists,” he said. “We have experts silenced and public health workers being demonized for doing their jobs.””
Related: Vaxxed Healthcare Workers 27% MORE Likely to Contract Flu: Study
Continuing:
“Much of the dissonance can be traced to the shifting state of science about Covid-19 and the way that uncertainty was communicated*, speakers said.
“During Covid we had the faceless bureaucrat nobody knows now telling people, here’s the health advice that we want to give you today, and of course it changed over time*,” said Georges Benjamin, a physician and executive director of the American Public Health Association. “We totally disrupted their lives. And the truth of the matter is, we had not built that trusted relationship. And in most cases, we didn’t have the white coat.””
*The Science™ “changed over time” because they were inventing expedient bullshit on the fly with zero connection to reality, much less substantiated by actual scientific research.
“Six feet” = pseudoscience
“Two weeks to stop the spread” = pseudoscience
Mask mandates = pseudoscience
These people insist — partly because they’re paid to, partly because they’re midwit toolbags who repeat whatever groupthink propaganda they’re inseminated with, and partly, perhaps for some who haven’t sold their soul, because their consciences force them to — that the essential problem is messaging, not ”lying through my teeth because you’re utterly corrupt and morally bankrupt.”
The consensus the Public Health™ community has settled on in the pursuit of re-seeding trust in the public, in the final analysis, is not that it should be apolitical, but more political.
Continuing:
Castrucci… said the profession had to be more personal and more political…
That means fighting back when the enemy is misinformation (the spread of incorrect claims) and disinformation (the intentional dissemination of falsehoods to achieve an economic or political goal), yet meeting people where they are. And “with the information they’re ready to hear and the ways they’re ready to hear and the ways they’re ready to hear it from the sources they trust,” said Julia Daisy Fraustino, director of the Public Interest Communication Research Laboratory at West Virginia University.
Is it literally possible to draw more incorrect conclusions from the past five years than that public servants aren’t political enough?
Benjamin Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.
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