"Public Health"
The Thing that Never Was
Thank you all so much for your patience. The Legislative season is finally winding down, we successfully defeated the travesty of the amendment the Senate tried to pass off in place of the CHARLIE Act (which means the whole thing is dead for the season [see here for more]), and I’ve been catching up with family commitments and home projects for the last week.
You all helped me push my debut book, Counterspell: A Field Manual for the Counter-Revolution, to the #1 new release on Amazon for the first week. I can’t thank you enough for that. Now, however, due I suspect to the weighty content of the book itself (and the time commitment to digest it) the Amazon algorithm is starved for reviews, and the book has all but disappeared from the recommendations. So, I’ll ask for another favor: if you’ve enjoyed the content, be it a chapter, section, or the whole book, please consider leaving an Amazon review to help drive further discovery of the book.
This week I would like to share yet another section of the work focusing on the misnomer of “public health,” and further analysis of the implications drawn from recent legislative events.
From Counterspell the book (one of many such phrases exposed):
“How “Public Health” Was Manufactured
Before I walk the roster of laundered doctrines, I want to dwell on a single case that demonstrates the entire mechanism in one frame. It is so clean, so precise, and so close to home that once you see it you will never stop seeing it. The case is the phrase public health.
Return for a moment to the chapter on language and the three-part test for truing our words. Health, in its plain and original meaning, is an individual reality. A body is healthy or unhealthy. A person is sick or well. A specific mother holds a specific feverish child. Health is inseparable from the concrete human being who possesses a body, who makes choices about that body, who bears the consequences of those choices, and who, under any legitimate ethical system, retains the moral authority to seek or to refuse treatment. Health is located where the body is located: in a person, individually, with agency, with responsibility, with dignity.
Now introduce the phrase public health. The public has no body. The public cannot get sick. The public cannot die. The public has no liver, no lungs, no conscience, no truly collective mind. The public cannot consent to treatment, cannot decline treatment, cannot weigh the relative moral claims of its own continued life against other goods. The public is not the kind of thing that has health or the lack of it, because the public is not the kind of thing that has a body at all. The term, on its face, is a category error.
And yet the moment the term is accepted into common usage, a staggering reorientation has already occurred. Health has been redefined. It now refers to a statistical profile of a collective that has been reified as if it were a single living organism. The body politic has been granted, linguistically, a mortal body. That body can now be said to be sick, at risk, vulnerable, endangered. The individual’s actual, physical body has been relegated to the status of a cell within the collective organism. And cells do not have rights against the organism. Cells do not get to refuse the organism’s demands. Cells are to cooperate for the good of the whole, and if a cell gets too uppity against the whole, its fate is apoptosis or phagocytosis: destruction.
This is the Hermetic vision in pure form. Recall from earlier chapters that the entire underlying metaphysics of Scientism treats humanity as the One—a single organism working its way through History toward unification and divinization. Public health is not a policy term. It is a theological term. It imports the Platonic fantasy of the city as a single body, Rousseau’s general will that overrides particular wills, Hegel’s state as the concrete expression of Spirit, and Marx’s social man for whom the individual is only a momentary expression of class. The phrase public health smuggles this entire cosmology into the conversation under the guise of a neutral, clinical category.
Watch now what follows, mechanically, once the term has been accepted.
First, a new priesthood appears. The collective organism cannot feel its own symptoms, cannot know its own condition, cannot speak for itself. It requires an interpreter. The public health official—credentialed, appointed, insulated from accountability—becomes the sole authorized diviner of what the body politic needs. Of course, this great and powerful structure, devoid of accountability, is a prime location of capture for perpetual revolution and ever-greater radicalization.
Your own doctor, who can actually examine your body, now ranks beneath the diviner who cannot. The mother, who can actually hold her child, now ranks beneath the bureaucrat who cannot. Because it is not her child’s individual body that matters in the new framework; it is the collective body, and she has no special claim on that one. The priesthood does.
Second, individual moral agency is reclassified as obstruction. Your refusal to accept a novel pharmaceutical product is no longer your decision about your body; it is a threat to public health. Your decision to gather with your family for worship is no longer your right to assemble; it is a super-spreader event. Your decision to keep your business open is no longer your livelihood; it is a non-essential activity endangering the community. The framework itself now makes your exercise of traditional liberty into a form of aggression against the organism of which you are merely a cell. And aggression against the collective licenses a response.
Third, traditional ethics is inverted. Under the older framework, medicine was ordered to do no harm to the individual in front of you. Under the new framework, medicine is ordered to optimize the statistical profile of the collective—and if that means withholding monoclonal antibodies from a white man with pre-existing conditions so that the public’s equity score can improve, that is precisely what the framework demands. I document elsewhere in this chapter how the Biden FDA’s scorecard weighted non-white skin color several times more heavily than significant pre-existing conditions in rationing a scarce, life-saving drug. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, “Fact Sheet for Health Care Providers: Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of Sotrovimab,” revisions in 2021 and 2022, p. 3, which authorized clinicians to consider “race or ethnicity” as a factor that “may also place individual patients at high risk for progression to severe COVID-19.” Operationally, this language gave state health departments cover to introduce racial weighting into rationing schemes for scarce monoclonal antibodies and oral antivirals during the Omicron period. Three states implemented explicit scoring frameworks: New York State Department of Health Memorandum, “Prioritization of Anti-SARS-CoV-2 Monoclonal Antibodies and Oral Antivirals for the Treatment of COVID-19 During Times of Resource Limitations,” December 27, 2021, which classified “non-white race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity” as an independent risk factor; Utah Department of Health, “Crisis Standards of Care Monoclonal Antibody Allocation Guidelines,” January 2022, which assigned non-white race a 2-point weight on a 25-point clinical-risk scale—identical in weight to congestive heart failure, and double the weight of diabetes; and Minnesota Department of Health, “Ethical Framework for the Allocation of Monoclonal Antibodies,” December 2021. Utah and Minnesota withdrew the racial criterion in early 2022 following litigation threats; the New York policy was challenged in Jacobson v. Bassett (N.D.N.Y.) and Roberts v. Bassett (E.D.N.Y.). The point for the present argument is not the legal disposition but the operational fact: the medical priesthood, given a scarce drug and a patient at the bedside, judged that race-as-class-membership should outrank congestive heart failure in determining who lived and who did not. That is not medicine. That is the doctrine. That decision was not a corruption of public health. That decision was public health operating exactly as designed—aggregating over the collective, silencing individual moral claims, and enabling ideological capture and collective punishment via equity.
Fourth, and most importantly for the purposes of this chapter, competing worldviews are delegitimized as anti-science. The Christian who objects to a mandate on conscience grounds is no longer exercising religious liberty; she is endangering public health. The parent who objects to a school policy of child-bureaucrat secrecy on parental-rights grounds is not defending his family; he is contradicting the science, and that pseudo-threat to the child via non-affirmation might just breach the threshold of abuse requiring legal action. The small-business owner who objects to closure orders is not asserting economic liberty; he is science-denying and eligible for forcible closure if not pogroms and mob justice. The phrase public health has pre-positioned every objector as a moral and epistemic inferior before he has uttered a syllable.
Public health is a theological construct masquerading as a medical one. It is Scientism’s archetypal trick. And once you have seen it in this one case, you will recognize the identical trick everywhere it is deployed: gun violence, the public interest, climate action, social justice… Each of these phrases performs the same trick: dissolve the individual, reify the collective, install the priesthood, delegitimize the dissenter.
This is how the Left’s religious system maintains its dominance. It does not argue against your worldview. It redefines the shared vocabulary in terms that make your worldview unsayable. They laugh at you, and, in too many cases, you shut up.”
Now, it’s important to answer a question I know I will encounter, though it hasn’t yet been made explicit, which is “if we can’t use the public health framework to protect against pandemics and such don’t we become defenseless?” It’s a very astute question, because I did not explicitly propose the positive vision for such defenses in the book. However, the reality is that such things, to the degree that they are a state interest at all, should be handled under a defense framework; i.e. they should fall under the common defense prescribed constitutionally, and be a military and police matter. From that frame the individual retains the full measure of agency and constitutional rights due, while those that do the dangerous things in the dark so we all can sleep sound in our beds get to expand their scope to appropriately counter biological threats under a paradigm that severely constrains their activities within the borders of our nation. Of course, decisions about things such as vaccination or medical care must always remain with the individual or their correct proxy (parent or guardian, spouse, etc) to consent or to refuse to consent. This framework does a much better job of upholding sphere sovereignty.
The next item is the necessity of educating and pressuring, via taboo-making mechanisms, your elected representatives and authorities to adopt this understanding and framework for moving forward. We just saw the very unfortunate defeat of a heroic effort within the NH Legislature to remove the vaccine for the sexually-transmitted Hepatitis B virus from the required list for children. Frankly, it’s an insult to every good and decent parent, and father in particular given his natural role as protector, that the state thinks so awfully of them that they would mandate such a vaccine for infants. This defeat came at the hands of a Republican Senate, and quite possibly at the behest of a Republican governor. It’s rather unconscionable given the political top-cover provided by the Trump administration by doing exactly this already at the federal level.
Fundamentally, this legislative defeat represents a misalignment with fundamental republican principles - that’s little “r” republican on purpose, as it references the form of government under which, ostensibly, people have rights to such things as bodily autonomy from the state (absent criminal conviction), and rights of conscience, religion, association, and more that are implicated in such decisions.
It is only within the framework of taboo-making by social mechanisms that such a thing gets fixed. Get to it.
