IN THE COMMENTS: Chanie said, "Shouldn't the tag be 'A Michael Moore'?" Ah, yes! It's not the Michael Moore. Tag removed. I'll give you a real celebrity making the same point:
Not the greatest optic to have your Health Director moonlight as a Walking Dead extra... pic.twitter.com/dBZSVgezbl— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) May 15, 2020
UPDATE: I put up this post because I believed it was from the filmmaker Michael Moore, whom I follow on Twitter. But it was from someone I've never heard of who tweets under the same name. It appeared in my Twitter feed because someone else that I follow had retweeted him. The gist of the tweet, like James Woods's tweet, was that there's something wrong or funny about an unhealthy-looking person serving as a health adviser. But, in fact, an unhealthy person could be a great expert! Health problems might lead a person into the field. And, certainly, anybody at any point in any career could develop a health problem, and it has nothing to do with whether they have expertise. And then there's the problem of simply looking unhealthy, whether you are unhealthy or not. It would be ridiculous, stupid, and unfair to pick your health expert based on whether they look healthy. Image means something in politics, and an expert needs to inspire confidence, but we're trying to ground ourselves in science and rational policy, and it's a mistake to judge expertise by looks and to assume that an unhealthy person lacks expertise.
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