| Time | Text |
|---|---|
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Doctors as Agents of the State
00:01:40
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| In a state like China, the medical profession does not have actual professional autonomy. | |
| Like it's an arm of the state. | |
| And I like that's the key. | |
| So when you say like doctors have become killers, it's how you define a doctor, I suppose. | |
| Because the thing that goes into doctor, so we have a lot of connotations to the term doctor, like, well, they understand themselves to be a doctor. | |
| So there's like this Hippocratic Oath, there are professional associations, you have kind of like all this kind of institutional scaffolding around this role. | |
| So in a state like China, some of those things are present, but they're also controlled by the Communist Party. | |
| And so I think that goes some way to explaining kind of what we see. | |
| Because if kind of the medical field is an arm of the state, then it becomes less surprising, perhaps. | |
| Because, you know, the doctors are perhaps acting in their capacity, not merely as doctors, but as agents of a state entrusted with a certain responsibility to conduct this particular activity. | |
| They don't have much choice in. | |
| Because they can't say, well, no, I don't want to do that. | |
| Or the consequences of saying, no, I'm not going to do that are extreme. | |
| Yeah, like, I mean, I've heard people being concerned with their own lives. | |
| If you're a doctor at a military hospital and the supervisor says, we're going to, you know, retrieve organs now, you can't just say, oh, sorry, boss. | |