Why Has Public Health Been Reduced to Drag?

Historically, public health was a radical profession. It challenged power and built large public works projects (sewers and sanitation) that dramatically improved lives. But the field of public health today bears almost no resemblance to the efforts from a century ago. Instead, public health today is this weird, exaggerated, corporatized performance of things that kinda sorta sound like health by people who have no understanding of science and medicine.

After years of personal observation, reflection, and engagement it seems to me that public health today is best described as a drag performance by marginalized people who allow themselves to be used by the fascist Pharma state because it makes them feel powerful.

The particular case study that draws my ire today is an editorial written by Rick Bright titled “A Trump Victory Would be a Public Health Disaster” published in the New York Times on October 10.

For those who are not familiar with Rick Bright’s crimes, here are the facts:

• The CDC’s own research showed that “Chloroquine is a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection and spread” (Virology Journal, 2005).
• For that reason, the US had a national stockpile of chloroquine in the event of a SARS coronavirus outbreak.
• In 2020, there was a SARS coronavirus outbreak. So the President of the United States ordered Rick Bright, then the Director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), to release the national stockpile of chloroquine.
• Rick Bright refused to release the chloroquine from the national stockpile because he decided it was unsafe even though it’s on the WHO Model List of Essential Medicines and has safely been used billions of times around the world.
• Bright was soon pushed out of his job. It is unclear why Trump failed to then send in the military to distribute the chloroquine instead. Someone (Jared Kushner? Scott Gottlieb? Deborah Birx?) must have gotten to Trump in the meantime.
• Bright then declared himself a “whistleblower” (which makes no sense) and he was warmly embraced by the Media Industrial Complex because he looked the part — a beta male, clueless, and raging with Trump Derangement Syndrome.
• By any objective measure, Rick Bright killed tens of thousands of Americans through his illegal and unscientific action.
• No evidence has emerged in the last five years to exonerate him. Other than Tony Fauci, Ralph Baric, Peter Daszak, etc. who created SARS-CoV-2, Rick Bright is the man most responsible for its spread and death toll in the United States.
• Rick Bright is one of the most heinous mass murderers in history. If the rule of law still existed in this country Bright would have already been prosecuted for crimes against humanity.
• Now Rick Bright spends all day every day trying to create a panic about bird flu to turn that into the next pandemic. His profitable hysteria is welcomed by the pandemic industrial complex and he is given a platform to spread his lies by the mainstream media.

Rick Bright’s actions show that he knows less than nothing about public health. He cherishes a certain left, postmodern, bougie ideology and rejects scientific evidence that contradicts his worldview. The net result is thousands of dead Americans who could have been saved by simple, straightforward, evidence-based practice.

For the New York Times to publish a half-page editorial by Bright in 2024 shows that its editorial board knows less than nothing about public health and they have learned nothing from the last five years. This is an astonishing development — that such learned people are literally incapable of the most basic forms of critical reasoning at this point.

Bright’s editorial in the New York Times contained no factual information about health. It’s just breathless secondhand assertions about the dangers of hydroxychloroquine, the evils of Donald Trump, the virtues of public health institutions, the wisdom of experts, the sanctity of vaccines, and the looming threat of future pandemics. It must have taken a long time to write because it seems that he had to retire to the fainting couch after each overly dramatic sentence.

Derrick Jensen would say that these people are engaged in a “toxic mimic” of public health. But it’s even stranger than that. These people (Rick Bright, nearly the entire field of public health, and all of the adjacent civil society groups who eagerly go along with the plan) are engaged in the public health equivalent of drag — an exaggerated performance of what they kinda sorta think public health should be like, without having a clue as to how actual science and health work.

So rather than hypothesis testing, rigorous data collection, and constant Bayesian readjustments of the plan based on incoming data we’re presented with endless theater — Ventilators! Masks! mRNA vaccines! Oh my!  Then when real-world evidence shows that none of these things work and in fact make things worse, the drag performers double down and engage in even more exaggerated and preposterous public health theater — this time with ominous calls to censor, blacklist, and cancel anyone who fails to demonstrate sufficient enthusiasm for the clown show (think of Peter Hotez recently calling for NATO to deal with the anti-vaxxers).

I want to explore two questions:

1. Why has public health been reduced to drag?
2. What does it mean to live in a society where the vast majority of civil society has lost access to logic and reason?

I read a lot of articles on drag in researching this essay. But it seems that no one can effectively define it. Is it a fun celebration of femininity, a critique of gender inequalities, cultural appropriation, or a reinforcement of “racial and colonial logics of the settler state?” I was actually surprised by the degree to which many members of the academic left are mad about drag and see it as insulting to women (you wouldn’t know that from the relentless corporate media promotion of drag). About the only area of agreement is that some people like to perform it and some people enjoy watching it.

But men perform drag more often than women; it’s a display of power (they’re drag “queens” and less frequently “kings,” but never commoners), and it’s usually about exaggerating certain characteristics of femininity (hair, makeup, curves). I should pause here to point out that drag performers are not necessarily trans — drag is a temporary performance to stand out, while most trans folks are trying to fit in. Isn’t one possible definition of drag then: beta males who are appropriating female power because it feels good to them?

And isn’t that what we see in public health as well — marginalized people who are mimicking the power of science and medicine because it feels good to them? Let’s be clear: most people who work in public health wanted to go to medical school but couldn’t get in because their test scores and grades weren’t good enough. Public health is the servile underclass of medicine. And Pharma loves that fact. They can get public health officials to do just about anything and, with a few exceptions, these people don’t have the statistical, scientific, or medical knowledge to question the plan. And why would they question any of it — being on stage and being treated as important is fun!

If you watch the meetings of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) or the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) they are entirely theater — there is almost no actual science involved in the vaccine approval process. Those people are almost all medical doctors and yet they are incapable of rational thought — ideology supersedes evidence every time.

So now we’re living in a horror movie where the drag performance of public health has become genocidal. Pharma puts them up to it and cheers them on and these beta men and women have really developed a taste for enslaving and killing the rest of the population.

But the problem goes well beyond public health. Nearly all of civil society and the state have lost access to logic and reason — which is why the exaggerated performance of fake public health is allowed to stand in for actual public health.

• Boeing planes fall out of the sky. Regulators just shrug and passengers haven’t changed their flying preferences to choose safer planes.
• Over 100,000 kids develop autism every year. Civil society just shrugs and designates April as Autism Acceptance Month.
• The state creates weaponized viruses to enrich its largest donors. Civil society just shrugs and does what they are told.
• Athletes in the prime of life drop dead on the field. Sports leagues just shrug and keep pushing the shots.
• Chronic illness in society has quadrupled in the last 50 years (as the vaccine schedule quadrupled) and no one is held to account.
• The birth rate has collapsed with nary a word of protest from anyone other than Elon Musk and no investigation of root causes.
• Nearly all of allopathic medicine (with the exception of emergency medicine) is fraudulent and people keep going to the doctor and begging for their prescriptions.
• Nearly every federal agency performs the exact opposite of their stated purpose and elected officials ignore their sworn oath and just keep raising money for reelection while getting rich from insider trading (because they never pay a price for their betrayal of their constituents).
• Both major political parties are led by people who don’t make any sense when they speak and yet we all keep pretending that one or the other is really super!

For most of civil society, cause and effect no longer exist. Things just happen. There is no attempt to make meaning or sense of things. There are just sensations, addictions, and temporary highs and lows with no telos or purpose to life. This is not normal. In any other period in history, the public would have already rioted by now in response to the horrific conditions we live under. Instead, we see a dull resignation that has morphed into a loss of connection with reality (as Naomi Wolf points out, you can see it in their dull, empty, far-away stare).

We are a deeply traumatized and poisoned people.

As readers of my Substack know, I attribute this loss of logic and reason to the mass poisoning of society, mostly by vaccines. But what’s surreal is that society and culture continue to bend and contort themselves around these injuries in ways that obscure and normalize these crimes.

As for me, I don’t plan to normalize any of it. I’m going to keep pointing out how weird everything is and keep calling for people to rise up until we overthrow this corrupt and evil system.

Republished from the author’s Substack