This morning I posted Jordan Peterson's take on the disastrous fall from grace of America's once-trusted institutions: government, academia, the media, and medicine. By the time evening came around I had also found Jeremy Tucker's point of view, with similar conclusions. It's an Epoch Times article, so I'll quote a few paragraphs for you.
Several new polls have appeared that confirm what you suspected. Trust in medical authority and pharmaceutical giants, along with their core product, have hit new lows.
People were willing to go along [with the government's COVID policies], simply because most people presumed that there had to be something true about the fears or else leaders would not be saying and doing such things. Surely, too, if this fear was being exaggerated, certainly the medical profession would have been the first to blow the whistle. Instead, we saw media, medicine, government, and pharma all marching in lockstep as the economy was crushed and civil liberties were wrecked.
It seems strange and bitterly ironic that following the largest and most expensive public health intervention in human history that trust would have sunk so far and so dramatically and is unlikely to recover for a generation. That is a problem that needs addressing. It certainly cannot be swept under the carpet, and the dissidents certainly should no longer be treated as problems to silence.
The people who expressed grave doubts about lockdowns and vaccine mandates should be given a hearing and spotlight. They were correct when the entire establishment was wrong. We might as well admit it. That is the beginning of the restoration of trust.
It makes complete sense to me, but I can see it would be confusing without the context of the whole article. I made the mistake of going straight to his conclusions, leaving out the statement of the problem, which is the falling public confidence in the medical establishment and its recommendations.
"People are more reluctant than ever to go to the doctor for routine checkups and diagnostics and less likely even to press 911 for emergency services."
For example, from a Gallup poll: "Fewer Americans today consider childhood vaccines important, with 40 percent saying it is extremely important for parents to have their children vaccinated, down from 58 percent in 2019 and 64 percent in 2001."
And this, from a Journal of the American Medical Association poll: "In every sociodemographic group in this survey study among 443,455 unique respondents aged 18 years or older residing in the United States, trust in physicians and hospitals decreased substantially over the course of the pandemic, from 71.5 percent in April 2020 to 40.1 percent in January 2024."
