So much of this pandemic has been an old battle, between public health and medicine. Medicine has the power,…

So much of this pandemic has been an old battle, between public health and medicine. Medicine has the power, and thus the loudest voice. I doubt the distinction between these 2 fields is even widely understood. Much of the tension between experts we’ve seen is this battle. /1 https://t.co/8d5D8HaVS1

(Table from https://t.co/Br9MSLHr5S) It irritates some health professionals that people with expertise and experince in other areas even dare to talk about a pandemic. One of the earliest things I Tweeted about Covid is that a pandemic is not a medical event. Medicine is…/2

…a last line of defence against a pandemic. It only appears in the front-line of Covid because idiot politicians refuse to do public health work, they make a pandemic a matter of ‘individual responsibility’. So, just you and your doctor. Medicine. /3

It’s exactly like saying Ukraine’s best weapon against Russia is its medics, tending to the wounded soldiers. How does this nonsense get up? Public health has been fighting infectious disease for centuries, it knows how to beat it. If it’s allowed. Almost exclusively…/4

…experts who side with government in this pandemic are doctors. Medical people. It’s them using the pandemic as a platform to continue long battles within health between them and public health professionals. The arrogance has often been astounding. And it goes beyond health. /5

Experts in ventilation - engineers for example - are repeatedly sidelined. Experts from the social sciences on behavioural change, on how to best generate support for ongoing pandemic measures, also ignored. The Go8 did a great cross-discipline report early in the pandemic. /6

It was mostly ignored by government, and its medical advisers. Even novelists and playwrights have vital insight into plagues, but again, are all ignored in favour of ‘making sure we have sufficient hospital capacity’ i.e. ‘we’ll let you all get sick’. /7

There’s an even more interesting thing to look at here though, for me, and I’ve Tweeted about it before too. These battles happen where the ‘individual’ meets the ‘population’, or the ‘public’. Public health people deal with the latter, medical doctors with the former. /8

That fault-line is central to our politics as well. We have a currently dominant, ‘neoliberal’, ‘libertarian’ political movement across much of the developed world, which says society is just individuals and their freedom. No population or public is mentioned, replaced by…/9

…’majorities’ (of individuals). So obviously resonant with the medicine view of the world, and openly antagonistic to the public health view. You can’t do public health with no conception of a public. What we’ve seen with Covid is what we’ve seen with climate change. /10

A multi-dimensional, existential problem, dealt with by a unidimensional political ideology of the individual. It’s really just bog standard politics, medical doctors have been used as human shields to disguise this. /end