Only 37% of the claimed 270 physicians are actually physicians.

Two or three days ago, I saw some petition by 270 doctors to Spotify to remove Joe Rogan's radio show due to his, according to them, propagation of misinformation.  I ignored it as just some other astro-turf type of effort.

Then a day or so ago, I saw someone had captured a picture of the signatories to the letter, most of whom were not doctors.  OK, interesting, but maybe just a statistical fluke.  Still kept ignoring.

This morning I see, '270 doctors’ called out Joe Rogan, but the authors of the letter and the vast majority of its signatories are not medical doctors by Jordan Schachtel.  The subheading is Only a handful are practicing physicians.

OK, now it is getting interesting.  

Well, I reviewed this open letter, and it turns out that only around 100 of the 270+ signatories to the letter are people with qualified medical degrees. And a large chunk of that 100 or so medical doctors are MDs employed at universities who are not in fact practitioners of medicine. 

Yet part of the letter reads:

“As physicians, we bear the arduous weight of a pandemic that has stretched our medical systems to their limits and only stands to be exacerbated by the anti-vaccination sentiment woven into this and other episodes of Rogan’s podcast.”

Paradoxically, the disseminators of this petition are guilty of the very misinformation label that they’ve attached to Rogan. In fact, neither of the two reported co authors of the letter — Jessica Rivera and Ben Rein — possess medical degrees. Rivera holds a master’s degree and Rein is a PhD academic who researches psychiatry.

Only 37% of the signers appear to be physicians.  The signers are signing a document that misstates their credentials in order to complain about someone else who has made no such false representation but whom they complain is a purveyor of misinformation.

Postmodernist thinking really causes a headache.  

Anyone who calls for censorship of others is automatically suspect.  But when the censors are themselves liars?  It is almost as if they aren't even trying to deceive.  They just think we'll accept any assertion.  

No wonder trust in institutions is so low.