The constitutional processes are now complete and Robert F Kennedy, Jr has been confirmed as Secretary for Health and Human Services despite a vicious, and at times vitriolic, campaign waged by the biomedical and public health establishment. For more than fifty years, I have been reading work by US medical sociologists on the power and influence of this group, and its consequences for health policy. In the light of this literature, it is difficult to convey just what an extraordinary event we have just witnessed. It goes against everything that social scientists writing about the US health system, have argued since at least the 1960s. Necessary health reforms have, it is said, been consistently blocked by the unchecked strength of the medical-industrial complex…
…This is a moment for a degree of humility rather than doubling down on calls to remedy the ignorance of those who do not afford the medics and scientists the status that they assume for themselves. It is time to ask ‘where did we go wrong?’ rather than denouncing the deficient intellects of those who think unapproved thoughts.
A Social Science Space blog