Public Health

If you viewed public health as a common good for the citizenry you might have been surprised like Dr. Bhattacharya by how things went the last few years. That’s understandable — it’s in everyone’s interest to believe pleasant and reassuring things rather than the alternative. But while one can easily come up with all manner of nefarious explanations for what happened — and I have — perhaps there’s a simpler way to look at it that accounts for everything we’ve witnessed: 

Think of the public health apparatus (CDC, FDA, local and national politicians, organizations like the WHO and AMA) as a trade association of sorts. It takes in funding from for-profit companies and helps market and support the industry as a whole. In this case, the medical industrial complex including the pharmaceutical conglomerates, the health insurers, the hospital chains, testing facilities, etc. It promotes their endeavors, engenders interest and incentivizes the public to use its members’ products.

If you have a drug that can lower cholesterol (statins) all you need to get the public on board is to demonize that essential substance in the body. If you have an mRNA product, you only need a dangerous virus, sufficient terror (and draconian measures like lockdowns, business closures and mandates) to create intense demand for the “safe and effective” remedy that promises to protect and restore normalcy.

Of course, this particular trade association is so good at its job, it actually got the government to buy the product en masse with taxpayer dollars and give it to them for free! It was so skilled it got the government (and even private companies) to mandate it! Imagine if the trade association with which I’m familiar (Fantasy Sports and Gaming Association) made it mandatory to gamble and play fantasy sports, had the government place bets for you with taxpayer dollars, and all you had to do was choose the bets and collect if you won! That would be genius, and RotoWire’s business — providing real-time information for fantasy players and sports gamblers — would have taken off beyond our wildest dreams.  

Of course, a turbo-charged FSGA would have been benign by comparison — sure it’s unethical to use taxpayer funds to re-distribute wealth toward successful gamblers, but at least no one would have died or been disabled from it. (Nor would they have funded dangerous gain-of-function research that likely created the pandemic in the first place.)

On second thought, maybe the nefarious speculations are still necessary, and my trade-association analogy only partially applies. But I still find it a useful way to think about the three-letter agencies in order to understand their otherwise bizarre behavior of green-lighting, rubber-stamping, falsely touting and outright dissembling about the products.

And no matter how we look at it, the important thing is, like Dr. Bhattacharya, now we know.