The quiet execution of public health

Infectious disease control just got a bullet in the head

I wanted to write this piece to capture in one place the most extraordinary directed collapse of public health in modern human history.

It touches on some things I’ve written about before but hopefully it’s helpful in collating sources and links.

The primary reason for writing this (and really for starting my newsletter in the first place) is because of the almost complete lack of mass media coverage of this world-changing event.

This has fed a very dangerous collective denial and delusion about covid in particular and the current path human society is on in general.

A recap

So let’s start with global life expectancy, which has dropped two years in a row for the first time since the great famine in China in 1959 and looks likely to drop for a third. Life expectancy only drops like this in world-changing periods of history.

Secondly, excess deaths. Excess deaths (deaths in excess of a pre-defined period of the past) in countries around the world ran at extraordinarily high levels during 2022, a year that was widely considered to be post-pandemic. For example in the EU, excess deaths in the winter just gone, winter 2022/23, peaked significantly above excess deaths in omicron winter of 21/22.

In the US, excess death every month in 2022 ranged from nearly 50% above normal to 5% above normal. Not once did it go below a range that would take it into pre-pandemic territory.

Elevated excess death has continued into 2023 in the EU and UK, with the most recent weekly data from the UK’s Office of National Statistics putting the excess death rate for the week ending April 21^st at 23%, or 2,300 more dead people than a pre-covid 3^rd week of April. Covid killed 615 of those people. In one week. In May 2021, 50-100 people were dying of covid in the UK and we couldn’t move for media coverage. Now, silence. Writing about ongoing disease death is so boring.

In 2023 as a whole in the UK, no fewer than 470 people have died of covid in any one week, with a max of more than 1,000 in January, and an average of around 550. So far in 2023 more than 10,000 people in the UK have died of covid. The pandemic isn’t over in any real sense, only in the socially constructed sense.

In the US, covid was the fourth biggest killer in 2022, and the third biggest killer in Australia and Canada. In Canada it is also the second leading cause of hospitalisation behind childbirth. In the UK covid was the leading cause of death in 2020 and 2021 and the third-leading in 2022.

It is also important to mention that more people have died in the vaccinated phase of the pandemic than in the period before vaccines. No, this does not mean the vaccines are killing people (tragically though it has verifiably killed some people) or that they are not preventing some deaths. It means 1. they’re not as good as they need to be and 2. vaccines have enabled the construction of a social reality completely at odds with natural reality. Something I have written about before. Everyone pretended covid was no longer a threat once the vaccines were rolled out. From workers to bosses, everyone was incentivised to believe vaccines had turned covid into a cold, in as good an example of the hegemonic collusion of class interest as you will ever see.

Covid is a nasty disease and was always going to inflict suffering, but the response by authorities has been the executing blow for public health.

The bullet

US hospitals no longer require staff or patients to wear masks and as of a few days ago the US federal government said hospitals are no longer required to report hospital-acquired covid to the CDC.

In the UK, the NHS announced that hospital staff & patients would no longer need to take a Covid test, even if they had symptoms, so data about hospital-acquired infections in the UK will now be next to useless. Many hospitals have also axed their mask rules. I would avoid going to hospital unless for an emergency.

The US has also stopped collecting paediatric covid data and it long ago stopped collecting data on so-called breakthrough infections of people who got infected after being vaccinated, because there were so many. John Hopkins, the leading source of US info on covid cases, rates and deaths was hobbled by the white house who instructed US states to dial back reporting.

The UK government has over the last 6 months progressively stopped collecting data about regional cases and infection rates, and stopped giving out free tests over a year ago now. The relatively comprehensive ONS covid infection survey has just been replaced with a far inferior version.

The situation is varied across mainland Europe, with France and Germany dropping mask rules in hospitals and GPs earlier this year, although some French hospitals have since brought them back after a surge of infections. Masks are still required in hospitals and GPs in Spain but the requirement has been downgraded from an N95 to a blue surgical mask (which are pretty useless and were only ever designed to stop droplets, not aerosols. They are called FRSMs. Fluid-resistance surgical masks).

Denial, delusion, whitewash

You simply wouldn’t do this for any other infectious disease let alone a disease that is a leading cause of death in many countries and the number one infectious disease killer.

Imagine this was an HIV outbreak and that outbreak led to HIV being the leading cause of infectious death. Inconceivable. Or drug deaths. But because it’s covid, because it’s airborne, because we have vaccines and because we need to move on for the sake of the economy, it’s denial, delusion and whitewash all the way down. We need to go deep into cognitive biases as well as a thorough exploration of capitalist structures and incentives to really understand what’s going on.

The danger of this goes far beyond our current moment in time. We have to understand clearly what has happened: Authorities have put a bullet in the head of infectious disease control, a fundamental of modern society upon which all public health over the last near century has been built.

They got bored. Like the media, public health authorities got bored and gave up on controlling an infectious airborne disease that will kill you at far higher rates than any other. And this gives us a very good clue about what will happen during the next pandemic. There will be no protection measures, schools will not close, businesses will not be offered support to stop trading to control the spread, there will be little effort to track the spread, and we will probably only know it is spreading when it’s far too late.

And the next pandemic is as inevitable as night and day. A system with 200,000 flights per day, ever riskier laboratory experiments and ever-deeper incursions into wild animal territories to chop down forests, mine the earth and build roads, has recurring pandemics baked into it.

The final phase

None of this should really be a surprise. This system has already wrecked our stable climate, annihilated the animals of our planet, sullied and siphoned our air and water, and to varying degrees, poisoned our bodies. The people in exploited places never knew life expectancy over 60. It was always coming for everyone, but being citizens of the imperial core, we were just further down the list. The last thing left was to reduce our life expectancy, and here we are.

The institutional power that could have fought back against mass infection was dismantled long ago. And some of us hadn’t felt the loss of those structures because we’ve never been homeless, never been chronically sick, never been the other. We hadn’t seen it because we live in places that tended to provide us with comforts by robbing them from other people. The system hadn’t yet reached the stage where it needed to cannibalise everyone. But now it has.

The machine needs materials, in the form of workers, fossil fuels, minerals and metals, and by the very essence of the machine it can’t be starved of these critical inputs. The machine wants to live, needs to live, even if that means you die. And even if in the end that kills the machine too.

But this doesn't mean we give up. Far from it. I really believe the system is now extending itself to its outer limits and in doing so can only provoke increasingly disruptive events.

As the machine works harder and harder to squeeze dwindling resources from people and from the earth, it will open up ever larger opportunities to thrust a wrench into its heart. The work then left to do is break the machine before it breaks everything else.

(original artwork by @ronniefurbear on IG)