Public Health Articles at Brownstone feature opinion and analysis of global public health policy including impacts on economics, public dialog, and social life. Public Health articles are translated into multiple languages.
So you’re going to the beach this summer, but have already finished the light and airy Fear of a Microbial Planet (why haven’t you left a review, by the way?), and for some strange reason you haven’t had your fill of fear and germs, so you are wondering what else to read.
“Numerous misleading studies, driven by subjective models and overlooking significant factors like voluntary behaviour changes, heavily influenced the initial perception of lockdowns as highly effective measures. Our meta-analysis suggests that when researchers account for additional variables, such as voluntary behaviour, the impact of lockdowns becomes negligible.”
Imagine the early days of the next pandemic, with public health and the media fomenting fear of a new pathogen. The impetus to close schools, businesses, churches, beaches, and parks will be irresistible, though the pitch will be “130 days until the vax” rather than “two weeks to flatten the curve.” When the vaccine finally arrives, the push to mass vaccinate for herd immunity will be enormous, even without evidence from the rushed trials that the vaccine provides long-lasting protection against disease transmission.
In the end, mad ideologues collapse under the weight of their own deceit and the shallowness of their dogmas. The earth-mother religion of a corrupted One Health and the feudalist ambitions of its priests will be no different. We should not fear public health or a holistic view of the world. They are ours and can be a force for good. Rather, we should expose the hollowness of the people who would subvert them, driven by their own greed and barren ideologies.
The pandemic opened the curtain to expose the folly of expert worship. Experts are just as fallible and prone to biases, toxic groupthink and political influence as anyone else. This recognition might make people uneasy. However, it should also force a sense of responsibility to search for the truth despite what the experts might say, and that’s a good thing.
This is the stuff of bureaucrats’ dreams: the legal authority to declare an emergency and the power thereafter to commandeer resources for oneself from sovereign states and to redirect resources funded by the taxpayers of one country to other states. The Covid years saw a successful bureaucratic coup that displaced elected governments with cabals of unelected experts and technocrats who lorded it over citizens and intruded into the most intimate personal behaviour and business decisions.
Now that states are moving to restrict public health powers, public health authorities face a choice that will decide whether the public will ever trust public health again. They can fight a partisan political battle against these laws, and the collapse of public trust in public health will continue apace. Or they can gracefully accept limits to their power in light of their pandemic failures.
Inadequate vitamin D3 intakes result in most people having a 1/10 to 1/2 of the 25-hydroxyvitamin D their immune system needs to function properly. This is relatively easy to attain with proper supplementation, and is necessary to suppress COVID-19 severity, transmission and deaths. However, most doctors and immunologists are unaware of – and uninterested – in the research which shows how important this is.
If we would seek to have the agencies of public health act as something other than a marketing arm and apologist for the revolving door of Pharma with whom they seem to so regularly swap staff and sinecure then it must once more be turned to serve the public. It may do so only if it regains the public trust and such trust, once lost, may only be restored by asking the hard questions and diligently following the answers wherever so they may lead until we may understand what went wrong, hold the negligent or malefactors to account, and have the means to prevent this from happening again.
No question that the administrative bureaucracies would lock down again under the same or new pretext. Yes, they will face more opposition the next time and trust in their wisdom has fallen off a cliff. But the pandemic response also granted them new powers of surveillance, enforcement, and hegemony. The scientism that drove the response informs everything they do. So the next time, it will be harder to restrain them.
This is a story of an author who promoted COVID-19 vaccine uptake among adolescents while failing to disclose significant competing interests (e.g., his holding of an unrestricted research grant from Pfizer). This is also a story of a failure of the author’s publisher Nature Reviews Cardiology to enforce Nature Portfolio’s declaration-of-competing-interests policy.
Antidepressants like fluoxetine double the risk of suicide and aggression in children and adolescentso, they often lead to decreased quality of life, they cause sexual dysfunction in about 50% of users, and these harms may continue long after they try to quit. There seems to be no rationale for using fluoxetine in young people for treating depression – the new analysis concludes the drug is unsafe and ineffective.
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