OPINION:
For months now, medical professionals, health wonks and infectious diseases’ experts have taken front and center on the political stage, advising, recommending, guiding and warning Americans into staying home, staying out of work, staying off the streets and beaches and out of restaurants and parks, stores and gyms — frightening the good people of the nation into wearing stupid masks on their faces if they dare step outside their doors, even for a moment.
Now they’re saying their warnings of gloom and doom and death may have, whoops, sort of, kind of, oops actually placed children around the world in danger. Fatal danger.
“Slowing the Coronavirus Is Speeding the Spread of Other Diseases,” MSN just reported.
Say what? Apparently, doctors have dropped the ball.
They’ve been so busily fighting COVID-19, and telling a nation, nay a world, how to best fight COVID-19, that they’ve taken their eyes off other diseases.
And now children are dying, or predicted to die, because of their incompetence.
“This spring,” MSN wrote, “after the World Health Organization and UNICEF warned that the [coronavirus] pandemic could spread swiftly when children gathered for shots, many countries suspended their inoculation programs. Even in countries that tried to keep them going, cargo flights with vaccine supplies were halted by the pandemic and health workers diverted to fight it.”
The result has been diphtheria in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal; cholera in South Sudan, Cameroon, Mozambique, Yemen and Bangladesh; measles everywhere; and a strain of poliovirus in 30-plus countries.
“Of 29 countries that have currently suspended measles campaigns because of the pandemic, 18 are reporting outbreaks,” the news outlet reported.
Here’s the horror.
“[The risk now is] an epidemic in a few months’ time that will kill more children than COVID,” said the president of Doctors Without Borders in West and Central Africa, Chibuzo Okonta, who spoke with MSN.
Where’s the outrage?
Where’s the anger?
Where’s the backlash against the so-called medical professionals who’ve been convincingly selling themselves as god-like prescients with god-like predictive abilities to forecast a nation of Americans, to foreshadow several nations of the world, into self-quarantining and stopping nearly all economic and educational and religious endeavors?
Their guidance has led to death.
Their best-guessed COVID-19 predictions have opened doors to more, worse health matters.
Their advisements have put in harm’s way kids who would’ve received vaccines for other diseases but didn’t.
Way to go, docs.
“Immunization is one of the most powerful and fundamental disease prevention tools in the history of public health,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO’s director-general. “Disruption to immunization programs from the COVID-19 pandemic threatens to unwind decades of progress against vaccine-preventable diseases like measles.”
So the message to America is this: Stop listening so intently to the medical professionals as if they know assuredly of what they speak. They’re not omniscient. They’re not even that smart or accurate when it comes to forecasting just a few months down the line.
If they were, children the world over wouldn’t be quarantined from a disease that data show barely affects them, only to face death and sickness from other diseases that are highly preventable, with the simple administration of a shot. All because of doctors’ educated advisements.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter by clicking HERE.
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