The past 2 years have been 98% politics, and 2% health science. The ‘public’, in ‘public health’. What does…

The past 2 years have been 98% politics, and 2% health science. The ‘public’, in ‘public health’. What does it mean? I reckon many would follow our idiot leaders and say it means a majority of the population. Nope. This is the real battleground. /1

The N=1 political crowd want us to think the public is ‘majority rules’. They can easily mobilise a majority, they’re the prom Kings and Queens who learned the skills of organising factions in high school, and have never stopped. It’s marketing, target your segment. /2

They call it their ‘mandate’, every time they win an election. Their excuse for abandoning all promises made, and inventing new toxic ones, because ‘they have a mandate’. But public health has never, ever been about majorities. About some idea of ‘balancing’ health and jobs. /3

By definition, public health was set up to look after the health of the population as a WHOLE. All of it, every last person. We already had medicine to deal with individuals or even groups. Public health isn’t ‘medicine for the majority’. In many ways it’s not medicine at all. /4

It’s something set up by governments to look at the collective, social, political and economic ways we live that promote ill health, and to rectify those. The first second politicians stood up in this pandemic and said we need to ‘balance’ public health action with…/5

…economic things, they should have been laughed at and immediately shouted down. Because that balance is what public health practice IS. In this pandemic our PM has followed his earliest stated intentions, with this sort of expertise, of ‘implementation, not advice’. /6

In other words, we politicians will decide what’s going to happen, and you experts will make it happen. Populism 101. The same politicians who are ignorant of 99% of the actual workings of public administration. Public health is about the health of every single person. /7

Not out of some noble sentiment, but because it recognises that populations can’t be ring-fenced into separate groups. No matter how you churn the data, such as making it percentages (common in this pandemic) to convince people some should be left to become sick and die,…/8

…we’re literally ‘all in this together’, because we actually are. Nationally and internationally. All of it is already connected, the dreams of the privileged to create gated communities and bunkers to remove them from wider population issues always fail. /9

Right now we’re asked to ‘live with the virus’, repeatedly justified by highlighting the small percentage of people who will be hospitalised and die. The entire society can become infected, can become sick, but that apparently doesn’t matter. It’s political spin, abhorrent. /10

This is really a political battle that has been going on for decades, between libertarians/neoliberals, and the rest of us. The former want us to think of society as an Economy, full of individual democratic customers. And the ‘will of the people’ then becomes on-trend fads…/11

…and fashions. Like selling clothes. There is no ‘public’, no society, they think that’s a myth. This is why they’re completely unmoved by current mass infection and illness. To them that’s only a whole lot of individuals who made bad choices. The Covid battle is the…/11

…battle to retain any notion of a ‘public’, as a whole. Of a society. Not an Economy, with different market segments. /end