The field has also become elitist

A couple of cogent paragraphs from Robert F. Graboyes, a senior research fellow and healthcare scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason in a letter to Healthy Future Task Force Security Subcommittee.

The problem is not merely one of ideology, but also of elitism. It appears that during the pandemic, public officials at times withheld information from the public, disseminated false information, and suppressed dissenting voices. As a nonscientist, I am in no position to offer definitive opinions on the technical aspects of COVID-19 (e.g., the lab leak theory, efficacy of masks, relative merits of focused protection versus lockdowns, school closings, and vaccine passports). But it is obvious to me that public health’s efforts to suppress evidence of a lab leak, the public denial of masks’ efficacy (perhaps to prevent runs on supplies), and attempts to silence academic dissenters has taken a significant toll on the credibility of and trust in public health officials.

Public health officials seem to discount the goals of ordinary Americans that may compete with goals of public health. For example, whereas reducing the spread of COVID-19 is good, mitigation measures involve some bad things: e.g., school closures, business closures and bankruptcies, damage to mental health, and loss of community. Done properly, lawmakers and regulators must consider both costs and benefits when making policy.

He summarizes at the end of the letter:

• Public health has become an ideological monoculture. The challenge is to bring ideological diversity—or at least tolerance—to a field that has difficulty speaking to those of a different philosophy.

• The field has also become elitist. During the COVID-19 pandemic, officials have suppressed scientific evidence, disseminated falsehoods, and intimidated scientific dissenters. They have failed to consider tradeoffs between public health’s goals and Americans’ other goals.

• Public health has drafted troublesome speech codes, and, in this regard, the medical profession has followed in public health’s footsteps with a vengeance. In the case of medicine, one prominent speech code seems aimed at turning medicine toward social justice and away from patients’ individual well-being. This speech code cites critical race theory as its inspiration and insists that doctors frame all health disparities as inequities, which are the conscious intention of some nefarious force.

• While public health struggles to carry out its core mission, its practitioners nevertheless are busily claiming sovereignty over vast portions of American economics and politics—a problem not only for health, but also for constitutional order. And all of these claims are emanating from a profession whose fingerprints are on some of the greatest civil liberties abuses in 20th-century America.

Sounds about right.  The solution to the problem as defined will be challenging.  It forces the Mandarin Class to quit blaming those whom they are supposed to serve and to begin address the problems they are creating from their own faulty belief systems.