I don’t know much about Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet (one of the world’s top medical journals); but what is clear is that he’s uber-woke. He was, for example, responsible for this controversial cover:
There have been other political covers, other woke editorials by Horton, and a fair few woke articles that, in saner times, wouldn’t be published in The Lancet. But once someone like Horton is handed his bully pulpit (and is presumably supported by “allies”), he can go hog wild with proselytizing and virtue flaunting. Yes, he may mean well, but his latest op-ed is so over the top, so full of the drive to reform everything in the world, and so unhinged in its tone, that there was a reason I once called The Lancet “the medical Scientific American.”
Here’s my own brief summary of Horton’s op-ed that you can (and should) read by clicking the screenshot below. These are my words:
“Global health” is a manifestation of colonialism and white supremacy, an exclusive and structurally racist club that must be decolonized and dismantled. We shouldn’t waste our time pursuing the traditional version of this practice, which won’t be decolonized until the entire world is fixed: rid of war, racism, unequal wealth, climate skepticism, and all other manifestations of right-wing politics.”
But what is “global health”? Well, I use the Lancet’s own definition:
. . . . we offer the following definition: global health is an area for study, research, and practice that places a priority on improving health and achieving equity in health for all people worldwide. Global health emphasises transnational health issues, determinants, and solutions; involves many disciplines within and beyond the health sciences and promotes interdisciplinary collaboration; and is a synthesis of population-based prevention with individual-level clinical care.
This, then, involves not just improving health of people throughout the world, but achieving “equity in health,” which to me means that everyone gets equal opportunities to access health care. Well, that seems fine: equal opportunity for everyone is what I want. Note, however, that they emphasize “equity in health,” not simple “equity,” which means representation of all underserved groups of people in professions—presumably healthcare here—in proportion to the groups’ occurrence in the population. But, as you see below, “equity in health” has been reinterpreted by Horton, half intoxicated with wokeness, into simple equity in everything, which leads him to not only indict “global health” for racism and colonialism, but also to call for sweeping reforms of the entire planet. Yes, most of these reforms would be nice, but right now there are sick people to cure, and we can’t wait centuries until everyone has more comparable incomes before we start making people well.
Click to read:
Seriously, Horton has gone the Scientific American route. I don’t mind him noting the underlying cause of health disparities, but here he picks up a megaphone, mounts a soapbox, and shouts his own views to the world. I will quote him so that you’ll see that I’m not making this up. I’ve put the more interesting claims in bold:
Global health has become fashionably unfashionable. The case against global health is strong. Global health is the invention of a largely white and wealthy elite residing in high-income, English-language speaking countries. The discipline claims to be concerned about the health of people living in low-income and middle-income settings. But the resources—human, infrastructural, and financial—underpinning global health are mostly concentrated in those countries already replete with power and money. “Helicopter” research is not uncommon. The contribution of scientists and research funders to sustainable advances in health care in the countries of their alleged concern is minimal. More often, the relationship between western medical science and the countries they work in is extractive. Global health institutions are mostly led by western-educated men. Global health agencies are only superficially member-state organisations. In truth, influence lies with those nations providing the greatest resources. Global health has enabled public health schools and university departments to continue to enrich themselves through exorbitant student fees and generous research grants. Global health journals are no better. Most are creatures of western medical publishing houses, even those that proclaim radical open access histories. The unearned privileges of a few suppress the justified demands of the many. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that global health is little more than an exclusive club, disguising its colonial origins and practices in the stirring language of equity and justice.
That’s a big passel of accusations. (He doesn’t note that modern science is also largely the invention of a “white and wealthy elite”.) First , I take issue with his claim that the desire to give everyone equal access to health care is the product of a “white and wealthy elite”, whose faux concern for sick people throughout the world really masks a desire to enrich themselves and their “colonialist” countries. Could it be that the powerful and rich countries like Britain and the U.S. (once colonialist, but no longer) simply had the resources and the moral wherewithal to do something about global health?
By the way, I happen to know a few people in global health, and I detect no whiff of colonialism about them, but rather a dogged determination to give medical care to people in poor countries. And believe me, they have not gotten rich doing so. Those are, of course, anecdotes, but Horton gives no data at all.
But you can see where he’s going. He wants global health “decolonized,” which presumably means that the initiatives of rich, white, colonialist countries would give way to those of poorer countries. But right now that’s not possible—at least not without the help and funding from wealtheir nations. I also note that to do so we must solve “inequities,” and by that he doesn’t mean just healthcare inequities, but even inequities in everything, including journal fees, which have already been tackled.
The view that global health is a colonial project underlies the call for decolonisation. As Franziska Hommes and colleagues wrote in The Lancet Global Health in 2021, the goal of decolonisation must be “to critically reflect on [global health’s] history, identify hierarchies and culturally Eurocentric conceptions, and overcome the global inequities that such structures perpetuate”. The democratic promise of global health to be an inclusive enterprise has been broken. Some critics argue that global health can never solve inequity. Some go further and suggest that global health is structurally racist. It is hard to disagree with these conclusions. Although global health journals might mean well, the operation of waiver policies for article processing charges has created a culture of humiliation for scientists who cannot afford western journal open access fees. Journals have worsened Northern ventriloquism, where scientists from lower-income settings feel forced to adhere to high-income norms and standards to be permitted to publish in their pages. In Global Health in Practice, Olusoji Adeyi offers a compelling analysis of how imperialism and colonialism became the “founding pillars” of global health. And his observation that “The din of protest against colonialism in global health is getting louder and it has merit” should provoke those of us who work in global health to pause. For Adeyi is surely right that “the Global North decides the narrative and assumes the omniscience to tell the Global South what the latter needs, when it can have it, how to do it, and on whose terms it must be done”.
But science journals, as Horton admits, have already waived publication fees for scientists and doctors from poor countries. Yet even in that gesture Horton finds sin, as fee waivers have created a “cultural of humiliation.” Okay, Dr. Horton, what’s the alternative? If there are to be publication fees, should we eliminate the “humiliation” by hitting authors from poor countries with those huge (and, to my mind, exorbitant) charges? Only a Pecksniff would find in an attempt to achieve equity yet another form of inequity!
And what are the “high-income norms and standards” to which those from poorer countries need not adhere for publication? Does he mean that we should give up standards of merit when refereeing papers from that group? Apparently! Let us lower the bar for papers coming from scientists in underserved countries. Perhaps we shouldn’t require them to have control groups, or use statistics instead of “lived experience”?
Well, I might as well cite the the rest of Horton’s short article. At the end the editor seems to lose it, calling for impossible (though desirable) reforms that must replace the effort we put into global health care. What he means is that we must get rid of right-wingers—the true opponents of global health:
When I was a medical student, I remember those attached to various causes arguing with passion among and against ourselves, viewing one part of our group as betraying the real truth that we were seeking to defend. Those on the progressive wing of politics are supremely good at introspective annihilation. And that same process of internal obliteration is now unfolding in global health. While we identify enemies among ourselves, we miss the larger story of just who our opponents really are—those trying to destroy the conditions for achieving the right to health, equity, liberty, and social justice. For the real enemies of the values we stand for do not sit within the ranks of global health. They are to be found in governments that instinctively mistrust—and who wish to undermine and defund—global organisations. They will be found among those who demonise refugees. They are the climate sceptics, anti-vaxxers, and purveyors of scientific misinformation. They are those who attack the redistribution of wealth, those who believe that war brings peace, and those who defend racism under the guise of patriotism. Global health practitioners should certainly engage in robust discussions about the meaning of their discipline. But they should be clear about who our struggle is really against. It is not global health. Instead, we must work harder together to create a new political frontier and forge a new collective against the true enemies of health.
This has very little to do with making people in poor countries better, for it is a political and ideological program to which he’s calling The Lancet’s readers. (Note the language of war: “enemies”.) High-sounding words indeed, and some of them I agree with (who could help but criticize anti-vaxxers and climate skeptics?). But demonisizing refugees? That is a viable discussion in the U.S. right now, and those who call for limits in immigration can hardly all be tarred with “demonising refugees.” This is hyperbolic, divisive, and inaccurate language. In the end, Horton calls us to follow his own program, for apparently he alone has identified the “true enemies of health.”
Even on her worst days Sci. Am. editor Laura Helmuth has never written stuff like this, even if she believes it. But Horton is turning The Lancet from a medical journal into Mother Jones. I wonder how many doctors adhere to his hyperbole and to his political program. Does he represent the views of British medicine? And what gives the editor of a medical journal the right to spout his personal politics as if it were official doctrine? Yes, if there are root causes of global health inequality that can be pinpointed, he has a right to mention them. But note that he gives no evidence for his claims, and in the end calls for all readers to join him in forming The New Collective.
Curiously, in an earlier editorial opposing Brexit, Horton, citing John Gray, asserts that the idea of progress itself is a “dangerous fallacy”:
Scientists and those educated scientifically are prone to a dangerous fallacy—we believe in progress. The notion that human beings are forever moving forwards towards a better place. It is a noble vision: the accumulation of knowledge, self-correction, the application of science to enhance society’s wellbeing and wealth. The discipline of medical history is almost entirely based on this admiringly Whiggish precept. But it is mistaken, philosophically and historically. John Gray shattered the notion of progress two decades ago in his bitter polemic, Straw Dogs.
No he didn’t. Only a fool could say that progress hasn’t been possible, and medicine is one of the areas where it’s been profound. Since 1900 the average global life expectancy has more than doubled. You’d have to be a fool to say that that is not progress. (I could go on about medical progress, but there’s no point; you all know about it.)
So, in the paragraph above, Horton apparently rejects an overweening characteristic of liberalism and Englightenment values: belief that progress can be made. Yet what is he doing in this entire editorial but laying out a path for progress and “health equity”? Either he is confused or has rejected what he wrote in 2019.
It is Horton’s dead certainty that he alone is right, combined with the accusations that his opponents are rich white colonialist supremacists who promote “global health” not to help others, but to enrich themselves—that combination is the sign of wokeness. He is sure his critics are wrong, and he will brook no discussion.
As usual, I don’t like publicly calling for people’s jobs, for that’s a woke tactic. But I do think that those who publish The Lancet should take a hard look at what Horton is doing to the journal. “Bodies with vaginas” indeed!
Let me finish by saying that Horton and I probably agree on many political issues. But that doesn’t mean that were I to become editor of a science journal, I would splash my views all over its pages.
That really does mean that he wants all countries to be equally rich and everyone in the world to have the same access to the same standard of health care. Everything other than that is “right-wing politics” of which the word needs to be “rid”.
This is so utterly ga-ga loony that it doesn’t merit serious consideration. It fails utterly to understand what leads to the world getting more prosperous and thus able to improve health care (and all the other desirables).
Can any rational person deny the fact that (rather than attempting modest incremental changes for the good) pursuing the chimera of a perfectly equitable world, rid of poverty and war and all bad things, has historically led to less than optimal outcomes? The breaking of eggs by fanatics and zealots has never resulted in the creation of a tasty omelette.
Apparently, healthcare must wait until after the revolution. You won’t get it, your children might not, but their children definitely will (they won’t). By the way, this reads much the same if you replace “global health” in the quotations with “bourgeois capitalism.”
That must be why Republicans voted over 70 times to repeal the Affordable Care Act (all, despite their solemn asseverations to the contrary, without any plan — nada, zip, zero — as to what to replace it with) until John McCain pulled himself out of his deathbed, bucked his Party, and gave the thumbs-down to defeat the final, desperate repeal effort by a single vote.
From from 2010 when the ACA was passed until July 28, 2017, when McCain put the kibosh on these efforts, repealing the ACA was the GOP’s number one issue. Funny how since McCain’s vote, and with the ACA becoming one of the nation’s most popular programs, we haven’t heard a peep out of Republicans about repealing it. (You may recall that, during the 2016 presidential campaign, candidate Donald Trump promised to replace the ACA a with much better universal coverage “at small fraction of the cost.” When the time came, like the congressional Republicans, it turned out he never had any plan at all.)
Yes, make every discussion about American partisan welfare politics even when it isn’t.
Was the United States even mentioned once in Horton’s editorial, other than by implication as the country that supplies most of the tax and charity money for current global health initiatives, evil and colonialist as they are?
I just had an upsetting thought: Pretty soon they’re going to be coming for that “colonialist white savior” Albert Schweitzer.
In the meantime, the article processing charges (APCs) are $6,830 (USD) for open access publication in The Lancet. I doubt very few institutions from developing countries can support such charges. It appears they have some funding arrangements for APCs in place from several organizations, most of which likely to be based on Northern white colonialist nations…
edit: https://www.thelancet.com/open-access
That’s Elsevier for you. IMO all scientific journals should be run by learned societies on a no-profit basis.
I agree, but many such journals are dying. Government imperatives to publish open access have incentivized researchers (esp. in developed countries) to publish in megajournals owned by publishers that can afford to charge less for open-access fees. Most learned societies publish their journals through a contract arrangement with one of these large publishing houses, which provide digital infrastructure (manuscript handling and peer review, linking the published article to referencing databases, hosting the published article on a large platform) that most such societies can’t create for themselves. The publisher imposes a high open-access fee in order to make a profit (and return some of it to the society). Such journals are trapped in those relationships, and struggle to persuade researchers to submit articles for review.
Yes. And the main thing that keeps this from happening is the strange way that “merit” is defined for appointments, tenure and also partly grants. Journal impact factor should not play a role (only the quality of the research should), but it does. Universities could unite and decide to boycott the extortative practices of Elsevier and the like, but they don’t.
This wasn’t from The Onion?
Good question!
It is possible that to those “in the know” about the machinations of getting healthcare to people in poorer countries — those who see how the sausages are made — will recognize a thing or two in this article that are true (?). I don’t really know. But from the viewpoint outside of that all I can do is think: wtf?? Where would outreach into world health be now without the American Red Cross, the Red Crescent, The Peace Corps, Doctors Without Borders, and the World Health Organization? I’m probably forgetting several other organizations that have white colonialist originations. If these were dismantled and delivered into those client countries, what would happen? Would that really be the most cost-effective use of limited resources? Remember we would be handing over resources into countries that often have very unstable politics, baked in corruption (let’s face it, that is commonly true), and lack of infrastructure. What would happen to international coordination when dealing with things like vectored diseases that don’t know borders?
So even if the system that exists now has problems (it quite possibly it does), the alternatives would be far worse, I think.
The organizations you list all originate in white, Eurocentric (and hence colonialist) parts of the planet. So do virtually all the concepts and technologies of the medical science they employ, which the editor of The Lancet evidently proposes to jettison in the interest of “Equity”. To pursue his agenda, The Lancet would have to limit publication of “Western” science, to make room in its pages for presentations by Al Shabaab, Boko Haram, the
Taliban, ISIL, and other representatives of virtuously anti-colonialist Thought.
The Taliban could make their case for shooting polio immunization teams who, while not Western, white, Christian or even male, work for the evil Western imperialist medicine based on the equally evil Western science, and are thus traitors deserving their deaths.
To me, this also brings the interesting question: does equity in health care mean making all countries polio-free? Or does it mean empowering Third World countries to follow their local cultures and prevalent ideologies in health care, even if this guarantees staying endemic for polio?
Boko Haram! That made me chuckle 😂.
I can see it now:
In this special edition of the Lancet, we asked our guest editors at the faith and spirituality centred collective Boko Haram to publish papers on the research that really matters. The group chose the theme of building stronger (bodies of) child soldiers through the eradication of westernised ‘scientific’ medicine. Below is the third in a collection of four papers, and investigates treatment outcomes in boys with acute malaria.
Boko Haram Paper 3: Effectiveness of radically decolonised socio-indigenous knowledges in the clinical management of acute complicated malaria in recently abducted child-combatants: a comparison of animist indigenous spiritualities and the therapeutic ethno-praxes of fundamentalist Wahhabism.
I don’t know when Dr. Horton attended medical school but it is almost touching to hear his recollections about fervent ideological disputes within his movement. When I went to med school we regarded the whole lot of them as kooks, like the various Judean factions fighting with each other in The Life of Brian.
I’m perfectly happy to decolonize poor countries and leave them to look after their own problems using their own money as they turn away from the west. China has shown great generosity of spirit in its Belt and Road Initiative across the Global South, even though its financial terms are a bit predatory. I’m sure they will use the profits they are making to bring about the New Jerusalem where we white racists so abjectly failed. I wish them well.
There is that little niggling problem of trillion-dollar climate reparations the poor countries want from rich countries, as they laid out at COP 27. Are they willing to say goodbye to that—not that they were going to get it anyway? Will they even allow western counties to attend COP 28, since it’s now obvious every single western country is, when you scratch the surface, a climate skeptic going by the sacrifices in de-growth the people of those countries are actually willing to make to prevent floods in Bangladesh and droughts in Sudan, and otherwise improve global health..
No good deed goes unpunished. I’m sure the doctors and nurses whom Jerry and I know who have worked in Global Health are feeling justly rewarded by Horton’s egregious, contemptible editorial.
Indeed, if I were a global health worker I would be fuming at his inflammatory editorial. What he wrote about these professionals is nothing short of defamatory.
I was thinking that too. Unless the field of international health care is permeated with this train of thought, it would surely confuse and alarm and presumably piss off a lot of people. And not just the White colonialists.
So there might be some entertaining fall-out from this one. I’ll get the popcorn.
The most remarkable thing about this development in academic publishing is the discovery that, at some point, such jejune and unworldly people have been appointed to serious leadership positions at major journals. Who appointed them? What criteria were they using? Were they always loons, or have they become loons since their appointment? They write as if they have no accountability to anyone for anything they say.
Not disagreeing with you, but I try to be optimistic: I’m glad that institutions like Lancet can withstand the effects of awful leaders like Horton. Similarly, my university has terrible leadership but offers good education, trains great graduate students, and produces important research discoveries. I think things will be ok in spite of idiots like Horton.
“and all other manifestations of right-wing politics”. How insane is it that a journal editor blames all the world’s ills on “right-wing politics”. Is he saying that it should be forbidden to be conservative? Imagine a world where conservatives dominated universities and wrote stuff like that about “left-wing politics”.
Richard Horton? You guys have no idea how bad he is.
Editor of The Lancet since 1995, Richard Horton, has been a piece of excrement for decades and has trashed the journal totally. He is a publicity-seeking Marxist narcissist, and moulds the editorial line and encourages pieces accordingly. But it’s much worse than you can imagine – his scandals have trashed people lives, misled millions of people, and undoubtedly led to human deaths. If there was any justice in the medical world he’d be in prison.
Here is a brief list of a few of his scandals while editor of the journal…
1. The Andrew Wakefield “vaccines cause autism” scandal. Under Horton, the Lancet published the infamous paper in 1998 where Wakfefield argued MMR vaccines were causing autism, and Horton defended the theory long after everyone else had realised it was fake. This scandal has caused untold damage globally. Horton suffered no repercussions for his major part in the scandal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_MMR_autism_fraud
2. The Roy Meadow “Cot deaths” scandal. In 1999 paediatrician Roy Meadow gave evidence at the trial of a woman, Sally Clark, who was suspected of murder simply because she had two cot-deaths of babies. The mother was convicted and jailed, and Meadows evidence was used to jail other women on the grounds that multiple cot-deaths to one mother were mathematically “implausible”. 4 years later the conviction was overturned after real mathematicians pointed out that evidence was garbage. Meadow was later rightly found guilty of serious misconduct for getting innocent grieving mothers jailed. Horton used the Lancet to defend Meadow throughout.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(05)66798-0/fulltext
3. The “Covid restrictions are racist” scandal. At the beginning of Covid, Horton thought the panic was just racism, and that border controls during pandemics were racist and harmful. He used the Lancet to promote this:
“In imposing travel restrictions against China during the current outbreak of 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), many countries are violating the IHR.
{…}
Some countries argue that they would rather be safe than sorry. But evidence belies the claim that illegal travel restrictions make countries safer.
{…}
Countries can start by rolling back illegal travel restrictions that have already been implemented and by supporting WHO and each other in implementing the IHR.”
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30373-1/fulltext
But within months he was pretending he had always been in favour of strong controls, and was attacking the UK govt for being too slow and not doing enough.
“Scientists have been sounding the alarm on coronavirus for months. Why did Britain fail to act?”
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/18/coronavirus-uk-expert-advice-wrong
4. The Fraudulent Covid papers scandal. During the pandemic he was responsible for publishing a fraudulent paper on Hydroxychloriqine. Work was being done on whether Hydroxychloriqine (an approved anti-malarial) worked against Covid; but then Trump waded-in and called it a wonder-drug, so sections of the knee-jerk Left (including Horton) were determined to prove that the drug is actually a dangerous killer – to discredit Trump. So Horton went ahead and published a clearly defective paper with the result he wanted. It turned out to be fake, but not until it had caused policy changes…
“Governments and WHO changed Covid-19 policy based on suspect data from tiny US company”
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/03/covid-19-surgisphere-who-world-health-organization-hydroxychloroquine
https://twitter.com/JamesTodaroMD/status/1267467530462990336
5. More Lancet scandals here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lancet#Controversies
6. Marxist garbage. Finally, here Horton is praising Marxism in a Lancet editorial: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(17)32805-2/fulltext
He is a charlatan, and a fraud, and should always be ignored…
Wow. Some of those would be awful. Especially the Wakefield thing.
Crikey, soon as I saw Lancet I thought Andrew Wakefield, and so word-searched to see if he had already been mentioned. I never imagined that he would have been responsible for that, as well, tho, after so many years. Nor was I aware of the other things.
Good grief! How on earth does he still have that job? His support of Roy Meadow is particularly egregious. I remember this going through the courts and and I was quite disgusted by Roy Meadow’s behaviour. His hubris and pig-headed ignorance sent a grieving, innocent mother to prison for 4 years. Yet Horton claimed that Meadow was not guilty of professional misconduct AFTER this had all happened!
Meadow was a paediatrician, NOT a statistician, and it’s clear he had a layman’s understanding of probability and statistics. Nevertheless he kept repeating the same old crap that he didn’t understand in order to convict and imprison an innocent woman who had already suffered the death of two of her children.
In his initial pre-trial ‘expert’ statement to police he claimed the probability of two cot deaths occurring in the same family was 1 in 1,000,000 (in his GMC hearing in 2005 he was unable to say where that statistic came from). Then before the trial started in 1999, he read an unrelated pre-publication report on infant deaths which claimed that the probability of one cot death in an affluent, non-smoking family was 1 in 8543.
He was an eminent paediatrician, and knew his pronouncements would be taken as fact, yet he didn’t have a clue what he was doing, and he knew it. He used the pre-pub report and his middle school level understanding of statistics to produce his ‘expert’ calculation for the court. The buffoon simply squared 8543 to arrive at a 1 in 73,000,000 probability that the children had died naturally.
Of course, the court bowed to his authority and eminence as a paediatrician, and the poor bereaved mother was jailed. Any paediatrician should understand that the factors leading to one cot death are not independent of family genetics, environment etc. He was told many many times by many many people that his reasoning was seriously flawed but he never changed his mind, nor lifted a finger to help the mother he sent to jail.
He ended up being struck off by the GMC, and rightly so. Horton should go the same way, why he still has a job is beyond me!
I suppose that the respectable editor whole-heartedly supported the efforts of some black South African politicians in the height of the AIDS pandemic to fight HIV with garlic.
However, I am also sure that whenever he is sick, he seeks help provided by the state-of-the-art evil Western medicine.
Garlic, yes, and olive oil, lemon, beetroot and African potatoes. Except for the latter, undoubtedly healthy. But no remedy for Aids. Mal Manto (= crazy Manto) died a few years ago from liver cirrhosis, due to alcoholism. She even got a liver transplant, but that doesn’t help if you keep drinking. She even (allegedly) smuggled alcohol into the hospital. I have little sympathy, her AIDS denial -and preventing the use of ARV’s- caused tens, if not hundreds, thousands of deaths (that is, BTW, the only positive of Zuma’s reign: he allowed the roll-out of an ARV program. But it is the only positive, all the rest was disastrous)
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_p9s0wrsT5BI/RtOoBpoKJ0I/AAAAAAAAAC4/Ad7bakC55ps/s1600-h/Manto.gif
It is an occupational disease of journal editors that they have to use that journal to promote their own political and cultural views.
All I can visualize is a knight in a rusty suit of armour holding a lance and lost his horse. A cunning disabled knight to be sure… Is he not a product of his own bleating lament?
I came across the “Global North” in another context the other day and was astonished to find that it includes New Zealand and Australia! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_North_and_Global_South
Hoeton’s piece is remarkable for the sheer density of accusations that it contains. Sadly, he sullies the reputations and questions the motivations of the many thousands of dedicated individuals and institutions that are committed to improving health worldwide. Does he really want to break it all down and start over? His article does a major disservice to the cause. Let’s hope that his message is quickly dismissed and forgotten.
“Break it all down” . . . .
I thought that was the point. Seems that those who live comfortable lives and work with words for a living are particularly prone to this disease.
Sadly, deranged posts like Horton’s invariably lead to apathy and even emnity. If helping poorer nations opens yourself to accusations of oppression and covert racism then you will end up simply ignoring other people’s problems, closing your purse and slamming the door shut. At this point I am unsure if people like Horton and his ilk are “neurodivergent” or just want to see the world burn to fullfil an ideological dellusion that from the ashes utopia will rise. In either case, maybe this is what happens to all civilizations in the end (waves at Fermi).
No, SJWs are not ‘neurodivergent’—if anything, they are all too keen to conform and march in ideological lockstep. And as for Horton, he might like to visit a person dying of starvation, AIDS, TB and malaria, all at once, in sub-Saharan Africa and ask them if they’d like a “white saviour”? Ignorant self-satisfied bastard.
“… achieving “equity in health,” which to me means that everyone gets equal opportunities to access health care.”
That’s not what the woke (and presumably Hornton) mean by it. “Equity” has nothing to do with opportunity – it’s all about equal outcomes. But that won’t happen until all (approved) identity groups have identical statistics, including the percentage of people suffering from sickle-cell anemia and the percentage of people with ovarian cancer, just to pick two examples.
Yes, it is insane. But that is wokeness.