The ever more politically minded Lancet medical journal is now urging pediatricians to “tackle racism,” calling it “one of the most neglected social determinants of child and adolescent health.”
In an August 10 editorial, the Lancet said that pediatricians and child health workers have not yet unleashed their potential “to disrupt lifelong and intergenerational disadvantages detrimental to health and development,” urging them to engage in anti-racism advocacy.
The editorial cites a “very important first policy document” on racism released by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) on July 29, saying it constitutes “a much needed wake-up call and guide at a time when in many countries the political climate and cultural environment threatens to reverse the little progress that has been made to date.”
Racism affects children’s development and health on three key levels — institutional, personally mediated, and internalization — the Lancet declared, levels that are “all interlinked and cumulative in their detrimental effect.”
Pediatricians and health-care professionals are called upon not only to “examine their own biases and approach to health care of children and their families,” the article states, “but also to engage in a much wider advocacy role.”
The AAP policy document says that pediatricians should “collaborate with government and community-based organizations to help redress biases and inequities in health, justice, and educational systems,” while underscoring “the need for a more diverse workforce.”
As it has done in other occasions, the UK-based Lancet points an accusing finger at the United States and particularly the Trump administration.
The guidance offered by the AAP “is specifically tailored to and especially timely for the U.S. context,” the editorial states. “In the current climate of the U.S. presidential administration, racism has become a daily discussion point.”
The United States is not the only target for the Lancet crosshairs. Last June, the once prestigious medical journal also accused Italy’s democratically elected populist government of abetting “racism” and “xenophobia.”
“Italy has been witnessing a rapid escalation towards racism and xenophobia since the new government came into power in June, 2018,” the article began.
Founded in 1823 as a medical journal, the Lancet has evolved into a mouthpiece of what it calls “the progressive agenda,” squandering its hard-earned moral and scientific capital on issues such as climate change, immigration, and gay rights.
Earlier this year, the Lancet ran a five-part series of articles on “gender equality, norms, and health” that denounced a conservative “backlash” against the global LGBTQ agenda.
“The progressive agenda that demands gender equality for girls and women and gender norms that promote health and wellbeing for all, including gender minorities,” a team of Lancet writers wrote, includes “advocating against toxic masculinities” and “promoting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) justice.”
In April of this year, the Lancet tackled the vexed question of global warming, warning of a climate meltdown comparable to nuclear war.
Titled “Climate Armageddon,” the review by Lancet’s Laurie Garrett breathlessly declares that just since 2017 “a number of record-breaking severe weather events, hastening melting of polar ice, rising sea temperatures, and the massive die-offs along Australia’s Great Barrier Reef have raised the tone of urgency among climatologists and earth scientists.”
In a tone redolent of the Y2K scares of the late 1990s, Garrett cites studies suggesting that as a result of climate change, “food shortages, alone, could kill more than half a million people,” while “millions more could suffer lethal events due to everything from surges in mosquito populations to collapse of electrical power grids.”
Having abandoned serious medical journalism in favor of politics, the Lancet now employs its once-venerable pages for ideological propagandizing for a far-left agenda.