Informed Consent is “fake news”

One positive outcome of Donald Trump’s presidency was his popularizing of the phrase “fake news”. It added a much-needed dimension to the word ‘propaganda’.

Informed Consent for all government services?

During the pandemic, the topic of informed consent was discussed and debated concerning experimental chemicals from Pfizer, Moderna and J&J. We were told the were FDA-approved vaccines. Time has revealed the truth about them.

Informed consent is subjective

Every human being processes information differently. Informed consent to any public policy, health related or otherwise, is not readily obtained by everyone without some coercion or misrepresentation or overt lies.

Some people are naturally skeptical and sufficiently knowledgeable to have legitimate questions and concerns about the appropriateness, safety or efficacy of a policy. Others are inherently more trusting of “authorities”, “experts” or “reliable sources”. My 91-year-old mother-in-law told me that she had been raised to never question “the powers that be” and never thought to do so until she met me.

Not to be trusted.

In the aftermath of the pandemic, a stream on information has become available to show that the skeptics had good reason to doubt the official narratives about the jabs, masking, virus risks to children, and much more. Those “official sources” of information have become victims of their own deceptions in that few citizens remain who are so easily cowed into “following orders”.

To defund, terminate or cancel altogether?

In the private sector, anyone who violates the trust of paying customers would likely be “terminated with cause”.

If every politician and public official who ever delivered a public statement that violated the trust of citizens during the pandemic was “pink-slipped”, I wonder how many would be unemployed (or even eligible for public sector re-employment) today. Since they were mostly senior employees with big incomes, the savings to taxpayers would likely be substantial.

As long as laws and regulations remain “on the books” to enable untrustworthy people with too much power to deceive and harm the public, the risk remains that others will follow to repeat these crimes. Expert private sector Risk Managers would advise the complete elimination of the root cause of the risk: to repeal all statutes that enable such mis-use of power to be possible with privileged impunity.

This is one case when I would trust the experts and act accordingly.