The Rise of Medical Fascism by Eric Reinhart

For decades, medical institutions in the United States have normalized collaboration with violence. This includes participating in forced sterilization programs targeting Black and Indigenous women until at least 2013, the psychiatric pathologization and involuntary institutionalization of Black men participating in civil rights protests, repeated political defense of for-profit healthcare exclusion responsible for at least tens of thousands of deaths each year, and essential support for both the nation’s profoundly racist and harmful system of mass incarceration and its CIA torture programs.

Some may be tempted to say that these shameful roles are a thing of the past. This is wishful thinking. The US medical profession’s complicity with cruelty has been especially obvious and further honed over the last 18 months, during which the Israeli government has used US-supplied weapons and diplomatic cover to bomb all of Gaza’s 36 hospitals, torture and kill approximately 1,200 healthcare workers, and manufacture famine as a weapon of war. Amid all of this, the representatives of the US healthcare industry—one of the most powerful political lobbies in the world—have remained silent. In some cases, our most influential journals and professional leaders have even actively defended and provided cover for unambiguous war crimes that UN investigations have repeatedly determined constitute clear evidence of genocide.