The Tragedy of Empty Credentials, Cont.
I’ve written in the last week about the tendency of the news media to overpraise favored public figures, and I’ve written about public officials who assert special expertise on the basis of credentials that, upon examination, obviously don’t give them the specialized knowledge they claim to possess. So now we have to talk about Dr. Barbara Ferrer, PhD MPH MEd, the director of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. She is very wise and important, and an expert on health.
In Los Angeles, back in 2020 and 2021, Dr. Ferrer was roughly as ubiquitous as the air. Her name was a much-recited magical incantation; I have fond memories of a tedious midwit member of my small town city council absolutely glowing as she reported to her colleagues that she had received a personal briefing from The Oracle, an act of High Magick that made the bearer of The Oracle’s wisdom become, by the touch of high scholarly anointment, one of the inner circle in the Sisterhood of the Virus.
Dr. Ferrer pronounced upon the virus; she knew it intimately, and could discourse knowledgeably on the topic of the virus’s intent. She knew its mind; she knew its dreams and aspirations. Is the virus still trying to kill us? What does the virus have in store for the fall? Where is the virus headed? In personal discussions, minor government functionaries would confidently say things like, “Dr. Ferrer says this virus isn’t done with us yet!”
Local officials and academics kept listening to her, because she was the expert on viruses and how they behave. She was our Saint Dr. Anthony Fauci, though I don’t think she got the votive candle. If you have the stomach for it, here’s a long video of a masked Dr. Ferrer explaining the virus to medical students in 2022, with a detailed discussion about proper mitigation strategies, the most effective therapeutics, the likelihood of death from infection, and other topics that reflected her deep personal knowledge of the virus. She shows up after an introduction, just before the seventh minute:
See, when medical students needed to learn about the virus and the way doctors should deal with it, they turned to Dr. Ferrer — who, after all, had the expertise to publicly scold and correct the top physicians at one of LA’s major hospitals that same summer after they made the unfortunate mistake of saying in videotaped comments that they were only seeing minor illness from the dreaded virus.
So.
Dr. Barbara Ferrer has a PhD in social welfare studies from Brandeis University, and I meant to do with her dissertation what I just did with California Assemblyman Corey Jackson’s dissertation. But alas, Dr. Ferrer’s dissertation is quite tightly held: one copy is in print, at the Brandeis University library. I welcome others to try, but I can’t even find an abstract. Here’s what Worldcat has to say about it:
One edition in one library. If you want to read Barbara Ferrer’s dissertation — the thing that causes everyone to call her Dr. Ferrer, the basis of her expertise — you’ll need to travel to Waltham, Massachusetts. You might have to read the thing in an underground vault, but that’s just a guess.
However!
Dr. Ferrer has also published some scholarly papers in public health journals, and they’re easy to find. Here’s one:
Let’s read it! You can find the full article in the American Journal of Public Health by clicking here, and then you can read…all six paragraphs. Here’s a third of the article:
I learned a lot from that, because it was deeply researched by an expert. Let’s look at another one of Dr. Ferrer’s scholarly articles, “Building Health Equity: A Community-Driven Approach to Confront Racism, Promote Racial Healing, and Sustain Equitable Opportunities for Optimal Health,” from the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice. Ready? Here it is:
Clearly, Dr. Ferrer brings a hard-earned expertise to the role of explaining to a county of ten million people how viruses work, and telling physicians how to manage a pandemic, and giving the public orders about how they must behave to in order to defeat it. It’s good that important experts like this have a lot of power and a giant public platform.
Weirdly, though, things aren’t looking so hot right now for the most important health expert in Los Angeles County.
What a shame it would be to lose her expertise.
Not surprising these useless and dangerous nobodies are failed upwards beyond all semblance of rationality. Public health bureaucracies in particular seem to attract power-hungry, vacant, scorpion harridans whose inner power-lust is in direct, reverse ratio to their intellectual and moral acuity. Canada's example during the lockdowns was....a graphic designer who ran a homeless shelter. That's it. Even by the subterranean standards of Trudeau's cabinets she stood out as being particularly self-delusional and septic.
And as a librarian, a thesis from a major university *not* being available either through the university library's digital archives or through the Digital Dissertations database gets my ears up, and makes me think there is fuckery going on behind the scenes.
Doktor Ferrer looks like she stepped out of Tales of the Crypt.
I'm afraid I had to scroll past the Great Covid Panic stuff - just about everything except what you had to say. My eyes immediately begin to roll in my head. The Great Covid Panic was the Great Unleashing of Fascism in this country. It was plain balls-out.