The trivialisation and normalisation of infection. For most of its history public health saw infection as a…

The trivialisation and normalisation of infection. For most of its history public health saw infection as a bad thing. During Covid flu and colds have been used by minimisers to suggest that widespread infection is a legitimate and existing public health strategy. Let’s see. /1 https://t.co/Uo2oER5puN

Since the 1930s, mortality has declined rapidly, due to massive public health programs, including vaccination. Influenza vaccination didn’t become widespread until the 1980s, so the bulk of the work in bringing that mortality curve down was other public health measures. /2 https://t.co/FGlXWfnRbz

At no time during that century was the strategy to ‘live with influenza’, and to use ‘natural infection’ to do that. The strategy was to prevent people catching influenza, and to use better treatments for those that still did. And to vaccinate for other illnesses, that were…/3 https://t.co/sW47neXIfQ

…often the co-morbidities that killed people, with influenza. The weaponisation of infection is entirely political, normalising mass infection has never been a public health strategy, until this pandemic. When the politics of our times, hostile to the idea of the public…/4 https://t.co/wSH1Lf42zO

…full stop, decided this was a new way to undermine everything public. Infection is disease, it’s bad. Increasingly it seems even chronic disease. Caused largely by inflammation, itself caused by chronic infection. /end https://t.co/SEsC5e9hJ0