Surgeon General Vivek Murthy struck a surprisingly conciliatory tone towards those who have differing opinions on how to handle the Covid-19 pandemic during a Sunday morning appearance on Fox News' "Fox News Sunday."
Responding to a question from guest anchor Trace Gallagher about the ongoing frustration of people who feel that the response coming from the Biden administration has been "political," Murthy called for "respectful, thoughtful dialogue with one another."
"I worry about the temperature rising in our dialogue, about people being shut out in terms of their points of view being heard," Murthy said. "We need to be able to hear all voices. We need to be able to respect one another."
That's right, the same surgeon general who just a few days ago called on tech companies to censor "misinformation" on Covid-19 and report it to the federal government now says he wants to play nice and "hear all voices." Apparently, the politics have changed more than any of us imagined. I know I certainly didn't see this one coming.
A conciliatory tone from Surgeon General Vivek Murthy that didn't seem to exist just a few weeks ago:
— Scott Morefield (@SKMorefield) March 20, 2022
"I worry about ... people being shut out in terms of their points of view being heard. We need to be able to hear all voices. We need to be able to respect one another." ?? pic.twitter.com/zBtqHfow6O
Here's the transcript:
Gallagher: Very quickly, there’s a lot of pushback, a lot of people saying "this stuff is political, and it comes and goes as the politics come and go." And you know, when you had the CDC director coming out saying, "listen, we said to follow the science, we didn’t say the science was going to be exact." Well, we sure thought that two years ago when we said, "follow the science." Everybody wanted to follow the science and we're being told, well, "it wasn’t exact," but yet if there were dissenting views on the science, you were called out. You were called names from a lot of media outlets.
Murthy: Well, listen, what we have to do in this is understand that number one, science evolves, right? We learn new data and that should inform our response, and that’s true with illnesses across the board. What's also really important, trace, is that we have the ability to have respectful, thoughtful dialogue with one another. I worry about the temperature rising in our dialogue, about people being shut out in terms of their points of view being heard. We need to be able to hear all voices. We need to be able to respect one another. We need to be able to recognize that we may have to shift our path from time to time based on new data. It doesn’t mean that people were wrong before. It just means that we've got to learn as we go.
Gallagher ended the exchange with the perfect phrase: "Because conformity is the enemy of science." To which Murthy agreed. It's hard to imagine where we would be two years in if all viewpoints had been thoughtfully considered by the powers-that-be instead of the worst possible answer being shoved down everyone's throat.
Sadly, this guy will probably be calling for censorship again in a week, because that's who they are. But it was still a stunning admission, even if it came two years too late.
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