When COVID-19 broke out across the world in 2020, it produced widespread support for expanded public health measures, including “lockdowns,” that are estimated to have saved up to a million lives in the U.S. and millions more worldwide. As tragic as the pandemic has been, as many mistakes were made, we should be grateful to the health care workers, public health officials and vaccine researchers who have prevented it from being far worse. And we should be very concerned at how their work continues to be undermined by the right-wing ideology of “herd immunity,” which claims that the biggest danger comes not from the virus but from these very efforts to stop its spread.
From the start of the pandemic, a vocal minority argued for letting COVID-19 rip through most of the population. These views were most famously put forward in the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), organized by the libertarian free market think tank American Institute for Economic Research and authored by Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta. The GBD called for a “focused protection” strategy, advocating lifting all pandemic […]
Some people are just born ignorant, or at least have ignorant parents which teach their children to be ignorant (sometimes not by their own choice); and it happens all over our country.
A narrowly focused article with little explanatory power. The phenomena described in this article has been 40 years in the making. The illness profit system has taught the population many bad lessons: surprise billing, private equity takeovers, opaque billing systems, limited in network coverage, perverse incentives, significant wait times for service, healthcare data breaches, massive cost shifting and pharmaceutical price increases, the list goes on….. The transformation of healthcare into a for profit business and the advent of “managed care” (really managed cost for the insurer), along with consolidation of healthcare has meant, from the patient perspective, that their physician went from a local solo or small group practitioner into being a corporate employee of a large corporation headquartered who knows where. No longer can the average patient assume that the practitioner acts in their best interest. You may trust your physician, but do you trust the corporation who employs them? The bills for care just keep rolling in….With the advent of COVID the elites made profound miscalculations. Shutting down the economy, many found that they were quite contented staying at home rather than continuing the decades long grind of having all of the increases in their productivity go to the top while their working conditions became increasingly precarious. Shutting down the economy gave them time to evaluate these conditions, and they were not pleased. This will be considered a blunder of historic proportions. In addition, the class aspect of the educated being permitted to isolate in comfort because they were now able to “work remotely”, while thousands of workers had no such luxury. They were “heros”, of course, until they weren’t and started to demand a wage risk premium for their efforts. There is little differentiation for the public between the healthcare system and the public health apparatus. The public health system comes with the power of the state behind it. So the public watched pharmaceutical corporations become increasingly wealthy feeding at the trough of the taxpayer while the profits developed for these experimental “vaccines” went into private pockets. The public watched while state imposed restrictions on their freedom increased and mandates for an unproven “vaccine” escalated while the authorities modified their justifications which subsequently proved untrue (e.g if you get the vaccine you can’t retransmit the virus). The public observes this while additional variants pile up requiring additional dosages, and noting that the Pharmaceutical companies will not share their medications with the third world. So unless the authorities were going to use the New Zealand strategy and close the borders there was only one outcome: an endless source of variants generated in the third world, and transmitted via travel vectors followed by endless vaccine mandates for the citizen. A case of diminishing returns for the citizen. All while the Pharmaceutical industry rakes in endless profit. As critical as the article is for the herd immunity, at least that side offered an end game. You may think that the cost was too high, and that the economic incentive was to sacrifice lives for productivity, but there was an end game. The manner in which this virus was addressed by the governments involved was heavy handed, with no end in sight as to the cost for the average person. People will reserve the right to defend themselves against systems which they do not believe are working in their best interest. Should the government actually be interested in building trust for public health, they should start with radical transparency. A tactic sadly lacking in the COVID response.
I once again agree with you, Albus. Here where I live in pa. the mgaloamiacal UPMC company took over our hospital and all the small clinics in the area. It was very sad to me, to see everything controled by the University of Pittsburg Medical Center (a big conglomorate) take over everything (and get most of the rewards for doing so).