Recently I apologised for my profession. It occurred to me it was about time someone said ‘sorry’ for all that was done in the name of science and medicine over the past two and a half years.
Sorry for the lockdowns, for separating you from loved ones, for the terrible healthcare costs, for the lost education, for the financial burden.
Sorry.
In medicine, when something goes wrong, all parties come together to assess what actually happened. It’s called a Morbidity and Mortality (M&M) conference, a no-blame environment where the overriding aim is to identify mistakes and make changes to ensure these are not repeated. This is the necessary first step, suggests Bhattacharya.
‘This is too big of a world-changing event and the policy failure too great to not give the public an honest evaluation. The outcome of this process should be that lockdowns are never again considered an appropriate way of dealing with large-scale pandemics and that “lockdown” becomes a dirty word.’
The future is not set, so we should also redress harms by increasing healthcare capacity to deal with backlogs and doubling down on investments in education. While we’re at it, why don’t we drop all mandates and reemploy sacked workers?