(This article is in reference to a joint medical boards’ statement on penalties for online misinformation, which you can find here)
The new theory is reasonable.
The application of said theory? Who dictates what’s true and not true? Especially with a virus we’ve never seen before? “There are no good studies” or “there’s no evidence” are phrases used to say we can’t do XY or z. But it only means that no good studies have been done. It doesn’t mean the medications don’t work. Two very very different concepts and yet I see them conflated all the time.
At the end of the day, this concentrates power to a small group of people who define what is acceptable and unacceptable. Totalitarian states have this. There’s a lot of historical precedent for this. Humans with too much power are too easy to corrupt. This then relegates the rest of the physician and scientific world to follow established protocols. No independent thinking. No innovation. No more observation. We become dependent on a few people with a lot of money who conduct “studies”.
A lot of our research field has already been tainted by industry funding. Studies showing a certain drug doesn’t work get buried while the study gets tweaked multiple times until it shows benefit. Then those studies are the only ones published. These are current problems that we have. They will get markedly worse now.
