Opinion: Health workers face a stark choice: become collaborators or resisters
“Authoritarian regimes often rely on doctors and other health workers to provide a facade of legitimacy and willing hands armed with scalpels, syringes, pens, or simply locks on doors,” writes…
A medical school scrubs mention of gender and racial health inequalities from its websites. A city health system advises its workers not to use their legal rights to protect patients or co-workers but to instead cooperate with ICE raids on hospitals. A university hospital instructs its physicians to stop providing gender-affirming care to their trans patients. A state health department compels its staffers working on abortion complications to hand over personal details of doctors and patients involved. University administrators threaten faculty members with firing if they don’t cancel publications on U.S.-Israeli war crimes against Palestinian hospitals and health workers and withdraw support from protesting students.
Actions like these have been rapidly multiplying across the United States’ most prestigious hospitals, universities, and research foundations. Thick administrative curtains and threat-reinforced walls of silence are helping many doctors, nurses, and professors remain ignorant of the creeping authoritarianism that surrounds them. But whether we allow ourselves to acknowledge it or not, American medicine and public health are at a crossroads.
