Can Public Health Be "Apolitical?"
Decloaking Poor Arguments Hidden Within Manipulative Language
There's been some “incidents” recently, worth diving into, and now's as good a time as any to put to bed this fantasy of an "apolitical" pandemic response. In advertising and public relations, we can use wordplay to attack others' ideals and embellish the value of our own arguments. Many of the advocates for repeatedly infecting unvaccinated children, their teachers, and their families with a brand-new pathogen, SARS-CoV-2, as early as Spring 2020, have claimed that their disastrous, unscientific fantasies are not "political," but simply based in "science" and "evidence."
Thus, critics of the idea of plugging unvaccinated children with the new disease, COVID-19, were simply inferior thinkers and lesser-minded political radicals, contrasted against those who championed COVID-19 in children - a virus overwhelmingly linked to cognitive & neurological impairment - who were simply enlightened intellectuals bringing the truth to the masses. This is what one might call "branding" in the advertising world, or perhaps even "establishing value” in infamous pickup-artist (PUA) circles full of manipulative, consent-violating slimeballs.
Let us first quickly define the term "politics:" Politics is how we as a civilization organize our manpower and resources. For example, in the above video, youtuber “DoNotEat” does a deep dive into the politics of urban planning and the thrill of…designing parking lots. The full series is genuinely quite fascinating & eye-opening.
Groups of citizens from different aspects of society, with separate but also overlapping material needs & desires, inevitably come into conflict. Through diplomacy, we hope to resolve these conflicts peacefully and attain a positive outcome for all parties involved. To vastly condense many issues into few, let us break down modern capitalist society into a few central groups, as neutrally defined as possible:
Labor: the working class; people who earn a wage as part of a workforce.
Capital: The wealthy, the ownership class; those who profit from employing labor.
The State: A governing body that organizes resources and manpower for a multitude of purposes - including policing, workplace safety, public services, etc.
A more libertarian leaning State, for example, would empower Capital to further exploit Labor - to the detriment of Labor's well-being, through such means like eliminating workplace safety standards. A more socialist leaning State, on the other hand, would take a more adversarial role against Capital in defense of Labor, to the detriment of private profits. If, for example, there was a deadly and disabling virus going around that was disproportionately working-class families - the government could not simply make an "apolitical" choice in their public health response.
Since COVID-19 first made landfall in America in early 2020, wealthy interests fought hard to lobby against any and all public health measures through various memes, platforming and funding a number of frauds - including Trump lackey Scott Atlas on Fox News, who has recently attempted to rewrite history and blame others for his own pseudointellectual failings. (Science Based Medicine) This would lay the foundation for the Great Barrington Declaration, a totally thoughtless rant drummed up by laptop class academics who never treated a single COVID patient, yet one nearly died of it. Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff would use this near-death experience, in which doctors and nurses fought vigorously to keep him alive, as evidence that he didn’t need a vaccine. Harvard would eventually dismiss Martin for being an anti-vax quack.
This has been an extensive political propaganda campaign against the very ideal of public health, not rooted in science, and has never relented - because in the short term, it’s seemingly more profitable for Capital to treat Labor lives (and their families, in the case of COVID-19) as merely disposable chattel. The consequences have been disastrous, with little interests from liberal or progressive voices to stand against them in a truly shameful display of intellectual cowardice.
![Vinay Prasad presentation keynote: "The Covid19 Pandemic: When Scientists Abandon Science" [by not plugging kids full of pathogens] Vinay Prasad presentation keynote: "The Covid19 Pandemic: When Scientists Abandon Science" [by not plugging kids full of pathogens]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Facd9be56-cc53-445d-9f85-0f9f92577260_800x450.jpeg)
The attempt to disengage one's own disastrous fantasies from the reality of politics and embezzle them to be "above" politics by hiding behind a bastardized definition of "science," as if the former is some sort of inferior thinking is a matter of moral cowardice and refusal to interrogate one's own assumptions - to mislead your audience into believing that opposing, critical voices come from simply inferior, delusional minds. This is a key tactic of the anti-vaxx, pro-viral brigade: To cover for their own intellectual sloppiness by assailing the character of their critics instead of their arguments. Hence why someone like Vinay Prasad of University of California San Francisco constantly calls everyone he doesn't like "idiots," "nitwits," or allege that they have brain damage, even when the ever-growing mountain of scientific literature debunks their unscientific, political agenda:
To organize the general public to embrace a deadly and disabling virus that, according to The Economist, has already killed over 30 million in just a handful of years. To disregard the pediatric health of tens of millions of developing bodies against a virus they weren't vaccinated against. To simply submit to constant illness, chronic fatigue, newfound long-term health problems, and outright disability. To essentially submit to throwing away the health of not only oneself, but their own loved ones - including countless children who are now dead and the adults in their lives are unable to “load a save game,” or “press rewind,” or simply “undo” such a poor series of decisions. Thousands of children since 2020, actually - largely unvaccinated.
Once you can train a population to accept that sort of personal degradation and turn a blind eye to tens of millions of their fellow countrymen becoming disabled by a single virus in rapid succession, you can discipline this population to accept nearly any form of abuse. That is the political objective of America's present SARS-Cov-2 pandemic response, and the guiding principle of future public health initiatives in America’s future: discipline via widespread pestilence. All because it’s more profitable for a few, and much less expensive to shift the burden onto working families.
Of course, there can be no "apolitical," much less "science-based" argument forged to justify such an approach, which leaves the champions of saturating the population with SARS-CoV-2 to resort to unprofessional, unscientific, and frankly embarassing arguments riddled with strenuous leaps of logic, catastrophic unspoken accusations, and the construction of a fictional cinematic universe that is utterly detached from reality. A well-oiled thought-killing machine, meant to confuse and overwhelm the average American into just giving up.