Pervertedness of some rewarding
Dragan Petrovec, Dnevnik, 8.11.21
Whoever has ever cleaned a full septic tank knows what it looks like when you open the lid. The smelliest and thickest is at the top. I'm not talking from my head because I have that rural experience. Similarly, the epidemic has washed up perversions whose stench rises over the whole country.
Already the beginning of Janša's fight for public health showed true colors. First enrichment for the selected, then protection, if at all. Followed by removal of all who would hinder such a concept. When whistleblowers appear later, intimidating criminal proceedings follow, later offering money for silence. They lied to our eyes about the suitability of purchased equipment that lay unused in hospital warehouses. When they replace the disobedient management there too, ventilators suddenly become flawless, although they don't use them.
Strict measures apply to the people, not to politicians who indulge in feasts in otherwise publicly closed pubs. Then they invent a formula to save Počivalšek, business for business, and declare that business meetings in taverns were never forbidden.
Since there's too much of this stench for one column, let me continue only with healthcare.
Carefully selected doctors get explanatory monopoly. In between are alleged experts who can't even explain their own measures or don't know about them. And even when it seems that doctors who know their job have the fate of measures in their hands, it turns out that the government makes decisions by its own judgment, often completely contrary to the positions of the expert group.
Then a few days ago, a quite desperate note by Dr. Ihan came out in Delo, asking about the reasons why we Slovenes are part of an unhappy region that with suicidal indifference to the epidemic becomes the target of astonished looks from the entire developed world. He calls for sociologists, psychologists and other masters of the human spirit to explain how our collective reason has been paralyzed.
We don't need any special master for clarification. Dr. Ihan should just look around his own guild. The medical one reminds me most of the church one. I don't remember such contrasts anywhere. On one side missionaries, Mother Teresa, Pedro Opeka, many like them, Caritas and Pope Francis as the ideological leader of that part of the Church. On the other, Vatican gold, Goričan, cardinal scarlet, bank frauds and debauchery with countless child abuses. No need to prove specially which side the scale tips heavily to.
Similarly I see healthcare. At the bottom are sacrificial doctors burning out with the epidemic, equally medical staff without whom doctors couldn't do anything themselves, nurses who are no more because they literally save their lives by fleeing elsewhere where they can still breathe. It's enough to read the note of DMS Marija Špelič (Who broke the wings of nurses, Objektiv, October 30) about the slave system established by medical elites. Family doctors, whose norm is a few minutes per patient, have been the most neglected branch for decades, yet the first one in contact with us when we need help. Who would still choose specialization in family medicine, this pushed aside and underestimated direction, whose importance we have only begun to realize now, when it's too late for many things.
Is there anything more perverted that the authorities can offer them than a few pennies per patient if they convince him to vaccinate? That they try to fix what the same authority has squandered with its lies and frauds, that is the last piece of trust. That it tries to save itself and its face, which it hasn't had for a long time, on the shoulders of family doctors.
At the top are different kinds of doctors. Those who get salary and bonuses but don't go to work at all. The inspection at the Orthopedic Clinic UKC Ljubljana showed that orthopedists earned three to four thousand euros more than before the epidemic, although according to UKC no one worked on covid wards. Their presence was recorded even when they weren't at work at all. At the top are also those who, besides basic employment, are contractually in four, five institutions simultaneously. Doctors who find it perfectly acceptable for a burned child to wait forty minutes without help in front of the hospital. A doctor in the role of minister who establishes systemic fraud with Janssen vaccine. And last but not least, politicians and doctors who under the mask of humanitarianism donate this same controversial vaccine to Africans. There people are used to dying differently than here. Especially children.
Dr. Ihan wonders if it's distrust learned from communism or post-communist transition in the good intentions of the authorities.
Whoever sees the good intentions of the current authorities in anything other than their own position, power and money is blind or a fanatical believer. Both diagnoses are actually the same. The astonished looks of the developed world that Dr. Ihan notices do not come only from the bad epidemiological picture. No one before Janša has received more astonished, more precisely horrified looks because of his criminal behavior at home and towards European politicians.
How could healthcare policy under his baton differ from everything he does at home and abroad, and where should trust sprout on this scorched ground?