Perhaps this doesn’t surprise you, but it stunned me. After being a doctor for 41 years, in and around healthcare for nearly half a century, I just assumed most people generally understood the education that was required to become a doctor. I thought people knew that after medical school you do an internship and residency. If you want to be a specialist I thought people knew additional training was necessary.
Boy was I wrong. It began to dawn on me that people, even smart people with popular shows on cable news lack a basic understanding of the career path of a doctor. When I saw doctors who obviously lack the proper credentials put on prime time cable shows and referred to as experts it prompted me to actually try and measure how ignorant people are about this subject. So I did some polling on LinkedIn. The results below blew my mind.
When I asked what training is required to be considered an infectious disease specialist, I got these shocking results. Nearly half of the people polled don’t realize that in order to be an infectious disease specialist, you have to do a fellowship in infectious diseases.
Well if people don’t know what an infectious disease doctor is, they are likely to be totally confused about who then is actually responsible for inventing the COVID mRNA vaccine. If cable news puts someone on prime time and introduces them as an infectious disease expert and they claim to have invented the vaccine, I suppose it is no surprise then that some people have no clue who actually did invent it.
Despite lots of articles about the history of the mRNA vaccine, nearly 1 in 4 actually believe Dr. Robert Malone’s wild claim that he invented it. If you don’t know what an infectious disease doctor is, and isn’t, it’s not surprising then that you might believe he did.
The fact is, not only is Dr. Malone NOT an infectious disease doctor, the claim he invented the vaccine has been debunked innumerable times. Dr. Felgner is widely recognized for developing the basic method for transfecting nucleic acids and Dr. Kariko is credited with actually turning them into vaccines. Malone was actually just the med student working in Felgner’s lab on Felgner’s RNA transfection research.
And finally, when asked to identify the real infectious disease doctors from among several frequently seen in the media, it’s not surprising, people cannot identify who the real experts are.
From the list aboven only Dr. Walensky is an infectious disease doctor. Cole is a dermatopathologist. McCullough is a cardiologist and Malone, who never completed any residency can’t lay claim to any specialty.
So what’s the point? No wonder the public is so confused and divided. They have no idea what education is needed to be a medical specialist. The media therefore has a duty to carefully scrutinize the doctors they put on TV and make sure they are actually experts.
Medical specialty societies need to do a much better job educating people about the training needed to be a doctor and a specialist.