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Lena's avatar

This is precisely why fully informed consent (consent free of threats) must always be the rule.

I am a nurse and until the pandemic started would have bet a year’s salary that my physician and nursing colleagues would have insisted on informed consent with regard to the vaccines. I honestly believed they would have universally demanded a cautious approach to the vaccines, as well as the NPIs that were used around the world, knowing that so much harm was likely to come from lockdowns.

I have never been more wrong. And realizing it has forever changed the way I view these professions.

These people are “good” people. They study hard, work hard, and spend their lives trying to help people. They frequently are generous with their time and money.

But they have a fatal flaw: They recognize no power greater than themselves. Their ideas of right and wrong are highly mutable because they are not founded on millennia old religious or moral code but on current trends in morality, which sometimes change almost overnight now with the advent of social media.

These people believe the authority to make decisions is conferred on them based on their professional expertise. They have proven to not have the slightest twinge of concern about overstepping their roles or establishing a precedent that will destroy our professions and cause actual physical and mental harm to many people. They are MAD that they should even have to explain things - people should just do as they are told.

Without safety controls (such as informed consents) firmly in place and vigorously enforced, we open the door to endless abuses by people who will never see themselves as evil. They will be confident in their righteousness because who else is better suited to make decisions for “the public good?”

Who or what process would be able to check that sort of power?

Knowledge that is combined with a largely unchecked ability to dictate policy but is wholly decoupled from a solid moral framework that has stood the test of time will turn itself into a monstrous force.

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JP Demar's avatar

I was just saying the same thing to my husband last night. I had just read about an experiment concerning rats drowning in water and what happened when you gave them hope. I won't go into further details of the experiment because it was awful. I cried when I read about it. And that's probably a relatively "tame" one. We definitely have more sociopaths in our society than we think - many just hide it in professions that allow them to harm others legally.

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