The protection of credentials.

Over the past century this is often referred to as self regulation by professional society.

The formation is designed to weed out the unprofessional person who uses the society’s reputation for a credibility beyond their own competence.

We’ve seen this tested in cases such as the Cave Creek tragedy and the CTV Building in the Christchurch earthquake.

In those cases both engineering situations.

More recently we’ve seen a different test of the strength of such societies – not a preservation of credibility but of their survival instinct. This happened during the recent Pandemic and more specifically related to the medical profession.

This is not a situation where I need to declare any conflict of interest and it’s coincidence that the doctor concerned was a police surgeon in Northland prior to the recent covid pandemic.

Dr Wojcik produced a video about covid which he posted online and in my case I saw this on Facebook and watched it twice because of its dissenting nature.

I would have watched it again but it wasn’t accessible because it had been censored as misinformation.

At that point the censorship of NZ Facebook was being managed by the Australian Press Association but having watched it twice I was puzzled as to what the misinformation might be.

I asked specifically what it was that justified the censorship tag.

The answer I got though lacked the credibility of professional journalism and without explanation the total censorship was removed although the video retained a lesser tag based solely on a reference to a situation in the United States.

In terms of what became of this doctor, he was expelled from his society and reduced to an alternative medicine practitioner, in Whangārei.

In many people’s minds he would be ‘a cooker’ and one might wonder how such incompetence ever existed in our medical society.

Another doctor who was suspended from practising after complaints that he was spreading Covid-19 and vaccine falsehoods has been found to have committed professional misconduct.

This case is currently before the Medical Tribunal but looking carefully at the text the words dance around disputing that the doctor was actually wrong about what he said.

“When considered as a whole, the tribunal is satisfied that the established particulars cumulatively amount to conduct likely to bring discredit to the profession … and are sufficiently serious to warrant a disciplinary sanction. Therefore, the test for professional misconduct is met.”

In simply language his crime is making the rest of them look silly.

Of course this isn’t something isolated to New Zealand, because we had a few silly doctors.

It’s a global situation and one where the dissenting doctors look to have much more credibility when political personalities like Dr Anthony Fauci can’t produce any scientific evidence for their demands of social distancing.

“It just sort of turned up.”

That’s acceptable?

But the cumulative action of some of these dancing doctors and the political rhetoric shared with politicians at the time is looking very much like “professional misconduct”?

I’m not passing judgment on that especially since New Zealand hasn’t had a covid inquiry yet but I do note that these men who have been persecuted to date had the courage of their convictions.