The World MAHA Wants to Return Us To
The Disunited State of Pestilence
In my ongoing series of book reviews looking at the history of public health through the lens of COVID-19, I originally considered that the goal of “Make America Healthy Again” was to return us to the 1800s. A time prior to vaccines where many children died of infectious diseases, prior to the establishment of the Food & Drug Administration. The FDA was established in part because scam artists were making a pretty penny selling literal poison to the public as “miracle tonics.”
From ivermectin to RFK Jr. and Marty Makary’s latest obsession with peptides, a core principle of MAHA is the freedom to exploit the public for profit by peddling useless and potentially dangerous junk. If you’re peddling cod liver oil to treat measles outbreaks, vaccines liberating children from the tyranny of a deadly and dangerous disease might put a dink in your profits. This is logical enough, but we need to go even deeper and darker.
The 1800s isn’t the intended destination on the road to “Make America Healthy Again.” It’s actually the 1300s. Today, we review:
Setting the Stage
“Medieval man was equipped with no form of defence - social, medical or psychological - against a violent epidemic of this magnitude.”
-Philip Ziegler, The Black Death
The science and medicine we take for granted was virtually non-existent in 1300s Europe. Astrology was the cornerstone of medieval medicine and med students learned human anatomy by watching pigs being dissected. While many of us learned about the Black Death in history class, little time is spent studying just how people conducted themselves. Much like many wealthy New Yorkers fled the city in the spring of 2020, wealthy Europeans also fled the urban epicenters of the plague.
Just a century before the Black Death, the world had just bared witness to a rather silly incident:
“In the early thirteenth century, thousands of members of the Children’s Crusade - youngsters who believed that pure prepubescent Christian hearts, not swords, held the key to liberating the Holy Land - descended on Marseille, seeking passage to the Levant. A number of local ships were booked, but, character being destiny in Marselle, en route to the East, the captains had a change of heart and instead sold the young Crusaders in the slave markets of the Muslim Levant.” -John Kelly, The Great Mortality
Eight centuries later, parents were told to shrug off infecting their children with a new SARS virus like it was a casual field trip to the heart of Al-Adil’s empire.
When it came to COVID-19, disinformation artists said young people were like soldiers in a war; that you had a civic duty to embrace a deadly & disabling new SARS virus. When it came to children, “we want them infected” was the position of the Trump Administration, thanks to one former official who now calls for mass executions of doctors and scientists on Substack. One might suggest that the real genesis of MAHA was out of anger that polite society rejected such obscene demands.
In the 1300s, there was simply no alternative to just making up nonsense; the creative imagination was all the medieval man had. This is all Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. can possibly offer and constantly does so at the slightest provocation. “MAHA” wants to go back to the world where they can’t be contradicted.
Seven Centuries of Broken Records
We can start with the most obvious temptation of pandemic disinformation artistry: Blaming the Jews. RFK Jr. is on camera claiming that COVID-19 was a Jewish-Chinese conspiracy. How administrators at Johns Hopkins, UCSF, and Stanford turned a blind eye to their faculty (Makary, Prasad, Bhattacharya respectively) embracing a vocal anti-Semite is indefensible. Especially when blaming Jews for pandemics is responsible to real-world violence:
“By November 1348 every well-informed citizen in eastern France understood that the plague was not the act of a vengeful God or of infected air, but of an international Jewish conspiracy aimed at achieving world domination. ... Christians, it was said, were dying because their wells were being contaminated with a Jewish plague poison. ... Marrying the Jews to the well poisonings gave people a sense of empowerment...men and women told one another: Perhaps if we kill all the Jews, the plague won’t come to our village.”
-John Kelly, The Great Mortality
So much of MAHA’s energy is spent howling like bloodthirsty jackals, constantly screeching out baseless accusations that don’t stand up to an ounce of scrutiny. Doctors, nurses, scientists, pharmacists, and public health officials have faced a torrent of unyielding abuse, threats, and even fatal violence for simply doing their jobs. The power fantasy of having command over those willing to take up violence on your behalf is tempting for many a sadistic reactionary.
The most commonly held view of the 1300s was that the Black Death was the divine wrath of God being visited upon Man for his sins. King Magnus the 2nd of Sweden wrote: “God for the sins of men has struck the world with this great punishment of sudden death.” What were these sins, you might ask? Perhaps it the foolishness of taking the God’s name in vain while slaughtering, pillaging, and raping across the “Holy Lands?” Oh, heavens no.
“Henry Knighton, an English monk who hovers over the Black Death like a cackling Shakespearean witch...believed that God smote a third or more of Europe because medieval English’s most glamorous young women were becoming [jousting] tournament groupies. ‘Whenever and wherever tournaments were held...a troupe of leadies would turn up dressed in a variety of male clothing ... and mounted on chargers. There were sometimes as many as forty or fifty of them, representing the showiest and most beautiful, though not more virtuous, women of the realm...and were deaf to the demands of modesty. But God, present in these things, as in everything, supplied a marvelous remedy’ -plague.” -John Kelly, The Great Mortality
After all these years, we’ve finally uncovered the real origin of COVID-19. It was never about “lab leaks” or “wet markets.” Enthusiastic female sports fans are the root cause of global pandemics. Katie Nolan, you painted jezebel, get thee to a nunnery before you get us all killed!
Selling Tickets to the Torment Prison
All jokes aside, monk Knighton’s blaming of the Black Death on women wearing men’s clothing to the joust isn’t all that removed from the victim-blaming attitudes of modern-day MAHA reactionaries. Old age, obesity, taking the vaccine, or even the foolishness of being born with a rare disorder - anti-vaccine quacks came up with all sorts of reasons to blame deaths on anything but viruses. What MAHA-adjacent wellness grifters are selling a subscription to not being one of the “vulnerable.”
“To MAHA, if you are sick it’s somehow your fault for not doing the right things, eating the right diet, etc. It’s health as a manifestation of virtue and disease as lack of virtue.”
-David Gorski, MD, PhD, via Bluesky (gorskon)
This is quite convenient if you’re affiliated with a Presidential administration doing everything in its power to turbocharge pestilence. Demolishing the Environmental Protection Agency is practically incentivizing the industrial pollution that causes cancer and chronic illness. Going all in on the “artificial intelligence” sham is already causing serious illness in American communities. If we put boots on the ground in Iran, a lot them coming back with PTSD and all sorts of other ailments, same as Iraq and Vietnam. It’s quite convenient for Trump to have MAHA show up and declare the public’s suffering is their own darn fault.
RFK Jr. and his fellow MAHA zealots want to shut out the distractions of actual science and modern medicine, trapping the minds of the American public in the same theatre of absurdity that the medieval European of the 1300s found themselves condemned to. How dare anyone contradict the completely thoughtless, ridiculous garbage that freely spills out of the mouth of the Secretary of Health and Human Services every time his piehole slides open. To be the warden of this horrific prison of hopelessness is a tempting prospect:
“Distracted by wars, weakened by malnutrition, exhausted by his struggle to win a living...the medieval peasant was ready to succumb even before the blow had fallen. But it was not only physically that he provided an easy prey; intellectually and emotionally he was prepared for disaster and ready to accept if not actually to welcome it.” -Philip Ziegler, The Black Death
Gee whiz, that sure doesn’t sound like anything relevant to what’s happening now in the 2020s, does it?
Closing Thoughts
When you’re reaching back through seven hundred years of civilization, there are obvious limitations. A certain degree of interpretation is required. Philip Ziegler’s The Black Death from 1969 acknowledges as such, and a significant chunk of the book is working through the records of English priests and friars, making for some dry reading. John Kelly’s The Great Mortality from 2005 is a more narrativized account, which is certainly more digestible, and I say this with no disrespect to Kelly’s writing, but Great Mortality leaves you wondering just how much is interpretation.
There’s been so much rewriting of history about the COVID-19 pandemic, an event we all have experienced in different ways. Perhaps I’m overly apprehensive about misreading the history of a past that occurred over 700 rotations of the Earth around the sun prior. Publishing is already being flooded with attempts to rewrite the history of the COVID-19 pandemic, and should humanity survive another seven centuries, will future historians know that those books are revisionist garbage?
The sad truth is that the government’s failed response to COVID-19 was to weaponize pestilence as a tool of pestilence over working Americans - to simply accept worsening material conditions, constant illness & disability, and declining quality-of-life & lifespan. Through “MAHA’s” billionaire-backed war against vaccines and public health, soon Americans will find themselves trapped in a prison in which there is no escape from the erratic ramblings of thoughtless cranks who demand that we are all as ignorant and impotent as the serfs of the 1300s.
It is nothing more than a form of societal cyanide.
