Summary
Over 15,000 doctors, through the Committee to Protect Health Care, urged the Senate to reject Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services, citing his anti-vaccine advocacy, promotion of conspiracy theories, and lack of qualifications.
Critics, including Hawaii Gov. Josh Green, warn his leadership would endanger public health. Supporters claim opposition is driven by pharmaceutical interests.
Kennedy’s confirmation would require near-unanimous Republican support in the Senate.
Advocacy groups are campaigning against his appointment, emphasizing his alleged role in spreading misinformation during past public health crises.
Quick question. Honest question. How many doctors are there in the USA? I feel like this headline could have been more impactful if it gave an idea of what percentage of the medical field feels this way. 15,000 doctors, across all 50 states…maybe I’m wrong, this is just a gut feeling based on nothing, but that seems low. Feels like some of the bigger states could have 15,000 doctors by themselves.
I’m not in any way defending RFK. I’m just saying this particular story seems like a non-story at those numbers.
Yeah, there’s about a million, so this is ~1.5%
As a person who’s organized petitions for widely felt issues, the impact isn’t strictly from a raw percentage of participation (though it’s a significant factor when that number is large). The impact comes from the number of people involved. Of the roughly 1 million doctors in the country, 1% were so against the concept that they chose to take direct action.
If that many people were moved to action, how many are against it but not ready or willing to fight? How many felt it wouldn’t matter if they signed? How many more didn’t hear about it?
Imagine if 4m citizens signed a petition, I don’t think anyone would be arguing that “but it’s not even 2% of the population!”
Yeah, it’s still impactful, I just also got curious about the number of doctors in the US and figured it was silly to look it up and not share.
Right, I’m sure many doctors are well aware of what demons the right are. I could see some organized effort to target doctors and sic the insane RW nutjobs on them in a campaign of stochastic terrorism.
That, or lean on people with the ability to punish them at their jobs, or have some way to make them unemployed.
At the same time it’s risky to use small percentages of big populations even if it looks big. If you cast a net big enough, you can drum up thousands of pretty much anyone for pretty much anything (I wonder how many nurses you or doctors you could get to say they’re anti-vaxx). Not saying this doesn’t hold water but just take with a grain of salt.
Agreed, and the right wing definitely does organize disinfo campaigns that exploit this. I remember the stupid anti-science right wingers trying to make a lot of hay with the Oregon Petition. Sure, they had a lot of people that had no business weighing in, but they had PhDs in that list, ya’ll, and they had, get this, over 31,000 of them overall, ya’ll!
The general population is not known for either their critical thinking skills, knowing the difference between engineering and science, and their numeracy, so it was a clever scheme…