What happened to your oath, Dr. Ben?
Listen to the science deniers in the Trump administration, and you have to wonder what the bojangling brother who runs the Department of Housing and Urban Development thinks of them.
Remember, before he sold his soul to Satan, Ben Carson was a physician, a revered neurosurgeon who entered the public sector with sterling credentials.
Carson graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School, and by the time Dr. Ben turned 33, he was directing pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, among the elite of the elite medical centers in the world.
You don’t step into that job denying science. In fact, you build your reputation with science at the epicenter of it. Science is what made you when you reach the top echelon of medicine.
From all his medical courses, from all the years he spent in labs or in operating rooms, laboring under a microscope or putting scalpel to brain tissue, Carson learned science ought not be dismissed.
Or so one would hope.
Yet Carson has been eerily quiet in the verbal tug-of-war between Dr. Anthony Fauci and Donald Trump over the novel coronavirus. Dr. Fauci stands on science; Trump stands on foolishness.
They are as far apart in their approach to halting the pandemic as neo-Nazi groups and the Black Lives Matter movement are on racial injustice in America. You can’t build a structure long enough to bridge their divide. They come to the table with no reason to seek middle ground.
Dr. Fauci and Trump appear as far apart, too.
In “Making America Great Again,” Trump has dragged the republic back into the Dark Ages. Dismiss science as the president has, and you end up with an America that looks like this: 220,000 dead, eight-million people who have contracted the virus and panic everywhere.
The numbers are chilling, but these are numbers that Carson, a rock star in the world of medicine, ought to speak to. Either he sides with Dr. Fauci or with Trump. He can’t play both ends against the middle.
Why Carson has not put his medical mind behind this dispute is beyond a layman’s willingness to believe. With a country unspooling at its seams, Carson and his calm might be what Americans need.
They won’t get it – not from him.
Carson’s head is buried so deep into Trump’s ass that you’d need the jaws of life to cut it free. The good doctor has not said a word. Instead, he has become yet-another of the Cabinet-level enablers who have watched Trump drive America deeper into the abyss.
In medical school, soon-to-be doctors take the Hippocratic Oath: primum non nocerem. Translated, it means: “first, do no harm.”
A president who banks on Lysol, warm weather and a plethora of vaccines-in-the-development stage to fight the virus has done much harm. Carson knows that fact better than anybody else who has Trump’s ear.
Yet people who have aligned with Trump have thrown away their moral compass. They prefer to trot out conspiracies, lean on junk science and listen to wacko physicians. But look what all of this has brought America.
Apparently, Carson has forgotten the Hippocratic Oath. He’s settled into a job where he can do no harm – but do no good either. He can fix the latter, however, if he tells Trump he’s wrong about science.