During her first all-hands meeting as CDC director, Erica Schwartz, MD, MPH, assured her new colleagues that she would "speak truth to power."
It was a nice thought. But it was the wrong one.
Whether Schwartz speaks truth to power doesn't actually matter much. This thought occurred to me because I happen to be rereading Christopher Hitchens' Letters to a Young Contrarian this week. In it, Hitchens relates an insight previously offered by Noam Chomsky:
"Chomsky ... wrote that the old motto about 'speaking truth to power' is overrated. Power, as he points out, quite probably knows the truth already and is mainly interested in suppressing or limiting or distorting it. We would therefore do better to try to instruct the powerless."
This identifies the problem precisely. We don't need Schwartz to tell HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Trump the truth. They either refuse to know or refuse to admit the truth. We need her to tell the American people the truth -- Make America Healthy Again followers in particular -- especially when Kennedy and Trump have it wrong, an unfortunately frequent circumstance, if you haven't noticed.
