“Data-driven” is a buzzword even in public health. Public health is the Marxist step-brother of the individualist field of medicine and generally unconcerned with an honest reading of available data. This moment in time makes that abundantly apparent.
Public health offers collectivist plans to address health, which is an individual concept. The medical field is becoming increasingly affected by the same. However, at its core, the medical field is not collectivist. Doctors focus on the individual patient. This can be traced back to the 2,400-year-old Hippocratic Oath and other texts on medical ethics. The public health profession can trace its roots back to the late-1800s in England as ideologies intending to push a supposed collective will on others grew in popularity with some intellectuals.
As such, every single pronouncement from anyone in public health should be given the same skepticism that you would offer a pronouncement from Karl Marx himself.
A Litmus: They Don’t Care About The Data
They don’t care about the data. If you need a litmus on this topic, this moment in time offers you many:
Remaking the American ...
Best Price: $12.55
Buy New $33.77
(as of 03:17 UTC - Details)
Public health professionals say 112,057 died of Covid this year, to date. Rather than taking data-driven approaches, in the face of their own stark numbers, members of the field are ignoring politically incorrect data on supplementation, falsifying data to cloud politically incorrect treatment, ignoring data for feeling-driven and tradition-driven approaches, and ignoring politically incorrect data about how to best manage shortages.
If political correctness is the standard that data must be forced to meet before being considered, there is no fidelity to the data.
Ignoring Data On Supplementation
There was a time when the discovery of vitamins were seen as a breakthrough. Today they are largely treated as lacking therapeutic value by public health officials, despite the fact that they might provide some defense in the matter of Covid.
Early data shows that blacks are disproportionately affected by Covid.
Recognizing that vitamin D improves clinical outcomes and that vitamin D levels are a factor in the severity of Covid infections, dark skinned people need more vitamin D because “skin pigmentation negatively influences vitamin D synthesis.” High risk Covid groups should immediately begin taking 10,000 IU / day to increase their blood serum levels because “vitamin D deficiency is common.”
This and other low budget, low drama direct method of benefiting public health is largely ignored by the public health community. Contrary to their words to the contrary, they seem to prefer drama over actually doing the things that are proven to be effective.
American Overdose: The...
Best Price: $7.13
Buy New $13.15
(as of 05:34 UTC - Details)
Falsifying Data On Alternative Treatments
Similarly, studies on Covid and vitamin A, vitamin C, zinc, and others have validity. Perhaps related to zinc uptake is the surprising discovery in 2020 that hydroxychloroquine has shown benefit for Covid-19 patients. Falsified studies that were unable to undergo peer review were published in the Lancet and widely welcomed by the public health establishment and medical establishment, not because it benefited patient health or saved lives, but because it offered a politically convenient outcome. Unfortunately, these studies have had negative impacts globally, and their retractions have had a fraction of the impact offered by their original headline-grabbing falsified results.
Using Feelings and Tradition To Advise On Approaches, While Rejecting Data
Face masks and quarantines are not data-driven approaches. Face masks are based in tradition. The efficacy of a full lockdown is neither tradition nor data-driven, and can hardly be defended as more than a power grab and show of force.
Refusing The Data On How To Eliminate Supply Shortages
Controlled markets create shortages. Free markets handle shortages. During the fake ventilator fiasco of 2020, in which there were said to not be enough ventilators to keep people alive, ventilators ultimately went unused and were later discovered to be overused and in danger of killing people. Did the public health mouthpieces say “Let’s remove restrictions and open up the market place to save lives?” They did not.
Tell Your Children: Th...
Buy New $13.85
(as of 05:32 UTC - Details)
During the hospital shortage of 2020 that never materialized, long since forgotten, in which Americans were told to flatten the curve of infection otherwise hospitals would be overwhelmed and millions of Americans would die, hospitals across the country went unused, health care workers were furloughed, new hospital facilities, military field hospitals, and mothballed hospitals that were reopened never saw a patient.
Instead of derailing society with the artificially imposed corona communism, did public health professionals call for less government rather than more government? No, they didn’t.
Who knows what the free market might have provided. We might have ended up with hotel owners setting up hospitals if their projections indicated that was useful. We might have ended up with luxury cruise ships providing hospital support. Instead, cruise ships were used as storage vessels for the negative priced oil.
They didn’t do that, they called for more government, for a lock down so drastic that a decade from now we may not have gotten past this. Rather than being data-driven, that’s how the public health field helped bring about the catastrophes of spring 2020.
An additional benefit to a market solution is that many entrepreneurs would have likely done market research before investing to solve a crisis. At that point, many entrepreneurs would have realized the futility of following the media fear campaign promoted by the public health profession. Government did no such independent market research.
Public Health: Preferencing The Convenient Circuitous Action, Ignoring The Effective Direct Action
Are they concerned about how to best save lives, these public health professionals, or are they concerned about sending staff to aid the rioters, based on some incredibly circuitous definition of what constitutes “health?”
Everything relates to health one could say. Riots directly create more food deserts. Food deserts are something that public health professionals have claimed to fight against for decades.
What Your Doctor May N...
Best Price: $3.07
Buy New $9.51
(as of 05:43 UTC - Details)
Riots directly kill people. Riots directly harm health. Riots directly make life worse. Lockdowns directly kill more people than they save. Lockdowns directly harm health. Lockdowns directly make life worse.
Circuitous definitions of health are not needed to improve health. There’s so much direct action that can be taken if one were concerned about health.
Why So Much Marxism In Annual Conference Themes, And Journal Articles?
To further illustrate the political leanings involved, in 2018 the American Public Health Association annual meeting was themed “Health Equity Now,” in 2017 “Climate Changes Health,” and in 2010 “Social Justice, A Public Health Imperative.” None of their keynotes, going back five decades, are about the way free markets have revolutionized every field they have touched. Instead, they appear to have either openly Marxist titles or an innocuous title with Marxist content.
By Marxism here, the topics can be an attack on the notion of property rights, or it can be a more subtle example of Critical Theory applied to the subject.
In the June 2020 edition of the American Journal of Public Health, Marxist critique figures prominently: Marxist critiques of technology as seen in the article “The Price Isn’t Right: Autonomous Vehicles, Public Health, and Social Justice,” Marxist critiques of health disparities as evidence of oppression as seen in the article “The Equality Act Is Needed to Advance Health Equity for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Populations,” and Marxist critiques of the class-based oppressiveness of policy “Smoking Behavior in Low- and High-Income Adults Immediately Following California Proposition 56 Tobacco Tax Increase.”
It’s questionable why there needs to be so much Marxism in a group that simply exists to promote health.
Curious Public Health Claims: Certain Groups Must Not Protest, Because It Harms Health
Unvaccinated: Why grow...
Best Price: $7.00
Buy New $6.99
(as of 05:43 UTC - Details)
Not surprisingly, on Thursday, June 4, and Friday, June 5, 2020, 1,288 public health professionals signed this open letter (PDF). It claims that racism is more lethal than Covid-19.
Two weeks ago public health professionals were saying the tiny Michigan protests held at the end of April would kill people by spreading Covid. In this letter, they reiterate those protests are bad because they challenge public health directives. They additionally offer a racist ad hominem about how the protestors are the wrong people. It’s not clear why “predominantly white protestors” is even necessary to mention in the letter. This is not data-driven, it is merely critical race theory. Rather than being novel or refreshingly bold, critical race theory is Marxism applied to race, and equally worthy of disrepute.
The signatories of the letter are saying the protestors and rioters who are the right people have no public health reason for being stopped, in fact they should be encouraged.
Of course, they say this about protests led by the Marxist BLM. It is unclear if a protest by black constitutionalists would also be deemed bad for public health. What is clear is that there is no data to support their claims. Data has never been a prerequisite for propaganda.
In the USSR there was widely documented use of medicine and psychiatry with a striking similarity to the letter in question. Alexander Podrabinek in his book Punitive Medicine described medicine as “a tool in the struggle against dissidents who cannot be punished by legal means.”
Public health is being used as a tool against dissidents who cannot be punished by legal means.
The 1,288 signatories represent a small fraction of the public health community, but are representative of the cross section seen during the lockdown. There is little credibility left in the public health community.
To Achieve Justice: Defund And Dismantle the Public Health Industry
The public health profession in the US has never had the level of control that it has been able to exert in the spring of 2020. America has been shut down entirely at their command.
Murder by Injection
Best Price: $37.99
Buy New $25.00
(as of 08:21 UTC - Details)
Because of the information networks long since built globally, vast portions of the globe have shut down following America’s lead. This is partly due to so many foreign newspapers providing global journalism coverage by merely having their journalists follow, summarize, and even directly translate New York Times and Washington Post articles and offering them to their readership as legitimate coverage of world events.
For those observing with a critical eye, the public health field will come out of this period entirely discredited as a profession. They have shown their true colors as foremost having a political agenda that they hide behind the amorphous umbrella term “health,” when they need to look like respectable people rather than the radical Marxists that they largely are.
The Marxist influence in American society crosses all fields: environment, economics, the academy, media, tech, government, and churches. Marxists in all fields demand ways to reduce economic growth and individual prosperity. Voices in Marxist-influenced fields are constantly angling for this. Public health is no different. After being ignored through mad cow, foot-and-mouth, swine flu (H1N1), bird flu (H5N1), SARS, MERS, MRSA, anthrax, ebola, monkey pox, flesh eating bacteria, H7N9 public health scares that never amounted to much, precisely because they were ignored, Covid-19 was the scare campaign that the American people finally fell for.
If Black Lives Really Matter: The CDC Data Is Clear About How To Save Lives
While imperfect, CDC data offers a good starting place for research and helps illustrate the order of magnitude of an issue. This is from the CDC’s June 2019 National Vital Statistics Report. Percentages are derived based on 335,667 non-Hispanic black deaths of all causes in 2017.
2017 Cause of Death for Black US Residents According to the CDC National Vital Statistics Report (Table 8).
1.) Diseases of the heart 78,161 (23.3%)
2.) Cancer 69,872 (20.8%)
3.) Accidental Injuries 19,869 (5.9%)
(Such as poisonings 8,266, car accidents 6,109, and falls 1,525)
4.) Stroke 19,088 (5.7%)
3 WORST MEDS, Former B...
Best Price: $35.95
Buy New $39.95
(as of 08:21 UTC - Details)
5.) Diabetes 14,798 (4.4%)
6.) Chronic lower respiratory disease 11,217 (3.3%)
7.) Homicide 9,908 (3%)
(8,371 are by discharge of a firearm)
8.) Kidney disease 9,542 (2.8%)
9.) Alzheimer’s 8,991 (2.7%)
10.) Septicemia 6,568 (2%)
61.) Legal intervention 152 (0.045%)
Legal intervention, or “death by police,” does not make the top ten list and does not even come close. In 2017, the CDC reports 152 black Americans died this way. Though this statistic is especially difficult to calculate number based on available data, again, the order of magnitude is likely accurate.
Every human death is a tragedy, but why at the behest of Marxist groups like BLM are we talking about how to save 152 lives instead of talking about how to save 152,000 lives? Why is that what the massive protests are about? And why are public health professionals, who are trained in managing data with integrity, fomenting riots?
Eat better, exercise more. It’s not revolutionary, but man does this save lives. There’s obviously a different agenda at play here than saving lives.
Johns Hopkins: How To Directly Save Even More Lives
Johns Hopkins, in a 2016 published study, pointed to medical intervention as the third leading cause of death over an eight-year period. At 250,000 deaths per year, medical error surpasses the CDC reported third leading cause of death — respiratory diseases, which claim 150,000 Americans a year.
This unaddressed problem is ripe territory for saving lives. Blacks are disproportionately harmed by bad doctors, so the racially-minded among the public health profession attacking this seldom discussed third leading cause of death will also disproportionately benefit black patients.
Far from the CDC showing leadership in addressing this problem, the Johns Hopkins team claimed the CDC does not even effectively collect data on medical error.
This lack of interest on this topic from the politically entrenched CDC is not surprising. Once operating under a cloak of good intention, by the spring of 2020 it has become evident that, rather than working to improve individual health, the CDC — the government’s premiere public health entity — is more interested in appeasing political and professional organizations, doling out vaccines, facilitating biological weapons programs, encouraging mass hysteria, locking down a country, and then supporting divisive Marxist politics.
Like the rest of the public health profession, even though many may operate with good intention, the CDC institutionally has a hard time focusing on anything but the most circuitous definition of health. That is no focus at all. The CDC began as a small budget, tightly-focussed, malaria eradication campaign in the 1940s and has morphed into a giant organization that can get away with saying “because health,” in response to virtually anything it does.
I look forward to scholarship on why the CDC should be closed down and government should vow to never again meddle in the field of public health. The evidence is abundant and demands organized attention.
The Role Of The Individual In This: You Must Not Let A Philosophically Impoverished Person Run Your Life
You must not let a technocrat run your life. You must not let a tech bro run your life. You must not let an expert in medicine run your life.
These are people who spend a great deal of time learning how isolated systems work and sometimes earn a great deal of money and prestige because of their expertise.
Anything that might be described as an executive function in your life or in society should not be held by such people. You must not let them dictate strategy or direction.
You are the one responsible for running your life. If you need big picture suggestions from the outside world, it is to be found in fields like philosophy, theology, ethics, and praexeolgy.
That too should be done with care, since all of these fields are, to some degree, under siege by Marxists and other collectivist groups. The Marxists for 5 generations have promised to quietly take over every institution they can, calling it “the slow march through the institutions.”
Public health must not be allowed to have any teeth, ever. For any reason. The results of spring 2020, under their nearly unchallenged guidance, have shown us this. They are first of all technocrats that should be welcomed in for occasional expert commentary and nothing else. The relevance of their voice is minimal. They are secondly ideologues with a penchant for being unethical with data.
Do not be surprised if, like many who advocate for big government programs, the public health “postmortem” on spring 2020 concludes that any failures resulted because too little power was given to the public health community. Any profession so influenced by Marxism is certain to have a fundamentally insincere membership.
Conclusion: The Awful Intellectual Roots Of The Public Health Profession Must Be Kept In Check
From its birth in Victorian England to the present day, the manufactured Covid crisis is the shining gemstone of the public health profession. Medicine is inherently about the individual patient. Public health is the polar opposite; it is all about placing the benefits of society over the individual. Only because it is cloaked in the word “health,” a fundamentally individual notion, does that field appear to take an interest in the individual patient.
Public health is born in Malthusian notions of population control, Benthamite notions of utility. Mix in a little Frankfort School Marxism through Critical Theory and modern day technocrat and you have public health. Economics is founded on the idea that wants are unlimited, resources are limited. Public health is rooted on the idea that those unlimited collective wants should be pushed as aggressively as possible against the very limited individual resources.
Public health is largely an awful collectivist field and the corona communism imposed on vast portions of the globe in 2020 has occurred precisely because unchecked members of this profession advocated for their untenable economic models.
Some of their weapons, such as clean running water, are incredibly helpful to society, but the weapons of public health go far beyond that into every segment of human life under a premise like “everything affects health.” Overwhelmingly, when not kept in check, their weapons and tendencies are destructive.
