The rot in medicine and public health is growing worse and worse

The dishonest way the Cleveland Clinic presented the results of its new study on Covid and heart health is only the latest example

I can’t stop thinking about the misleading way a top physician at the Cleveland Clinic presented the results of a paper he co-authored last week.

The study was good news. That’s the truth. As I wrote on Friday, It showed that for the vast majority of people¹, Covid had no long-term heart problems.

Yet the physician, Dr. Stanley L. Hazen, apparently didn’t want to give people the good news. He preferred to offer the scariest possible interpretation of his findings.

Why? Why would Hazen and the Cleveland Clinic go out of their way to frighten?

I don’t know. I asked them directly, and they did not respond.

But their attitude fits with the second article I wrote Friday, the one about the collapse in demand for the mRNA Covid jabs - which the Centers for Disease Control are still recommending for every American more than six months old.

The two articles are the flip side of the same coin; overstate Covid’s dangers while promising that Covid jabs are the miracle cure. For four years now, the most senior officials and most decorated doctors at the supposedly most trusted institutions in the United States have been playing this game.

And they cannot seem to stop themselves, no matter the consequences.

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(Help me beat their rigged games. For less than 20 cents a day.)

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Here’s the ultimate truth: much of what doctors do - and most of what public health experts do or say - matters very little.

At best.

The United States has the world’s most expensive medical complex, now costing roughly $5 trillion a year - $15,000 for every American. It also has a massive, richly financed public health system that over the last generation has aggressively reached into our lives to promote behaviors it deems healthy, like flu vaccines.

The result is that American life expectancy has remained flat for roughly the last 20 years, even counting its post-Covid recovery.

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(Don’t fear the reaper!)

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Even the life expectancy statistic, cruel as it is, understates the problem.

By many measures, we are much less healthy than we were a generation ago. We’re suffering from an unprecedented overdose crisis, massive (for lack of a better word) problems with obesity, and a broad decline in mental health in teenagers and young adults.

More recently, public health experts proved completely wrong about both the necessity and the long-term harms of Covid lockdowns and school closures. And they continue to lie, in the face of all available evidence, about the origins of Covid.

In the face of these crises and failures, one might expect a little humility from our medical betters. A lot of humility, in fact.

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One would be wrong.

They are still stuck in the same mindset: they overstating the value of the interventions they have to offer while at the same time pretending that disaster will befall us all if we do not listen. Everything, everything is a problem that they can fix. If we would only listen a little better, if we would only let them salve our pain - with opioids, if necessary - life would be so much better.

As Upton Sinclair wrote over a century ago, in 19 words that sum up so much of life: It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

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(My salary depends on you.)

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But more and more Americans DO understand the truth: they can no longer unequivocally trust the medical and public health complex to behave in their interest. Its combination of hidden (and not-so-hidden) financial incentives and political motives mean that it too often acts at cross-purposes to the people it is supposed to help.

The response from the medical and public health elites has been a combination of puzzlement - why don’t they trust us? - and more of the same, lies and misstatements repeated at higher volume.

How do we get out of this cycle?

I don’t know.

But, at a minimum, public health - and doctors themselves - need to be far more honest about what they can and cannot do.

1. In addition, the study was likely statistically compromised for the tiny minority of patients it found to have post-Covid heart problems - because it does not seem to have compared them to the right control group. But even if that finding was accurate, the bigger issue remains - the study showed that most people had no post-Covid risk, and the authors presented their results in a way that hid that fact.