27 June

This seems a sensible article. Except more than anything it shows the collapse of public health. The idea of public health is to prevent disease *arriving* at your home in the first place. To control diseases in public spaces and activities, so that they can’t spread into homes. Then fatuous politicians changed all that to ‘personal responsibility’ public health. A totally nonsensical idea, no individual can do public health. Step back and you can see here just one more victory for what we call privatisation. We now pay more and more for basics like education, transport, and health care. It’s politics, the small-government loons, not science. Dismantling all the public infrastructure set up post-WW2 to create a healthy and prosperous public-based society. Culturally this is the kidult culture I talk about, the shift to a focus on individual ‘living our best lives’. Former public life is now just a stage for us all to perform our beloved individual identities on. The reasons you’re now forced to ‘live with Covid’ is this same shift. Politicians wanted to destroy public health, because it interrupted their beloved (and total fiction) ‘economy’. ‘Lives and livelihoods’, they said, and idiots lapped that up as some sort of common sense. Public health was invented to reject that distinction outright. How stupid we now are to think we have to ‘balance’ (a total weasel word used by politicians) our health against our livelihood. They’re the same thing. You can’t work if you’re sick.