The greatest leaps in science are always conceptual. I see so much science today that is obsessed with…

The greatest leaps in science are always conceptual. I see so much science today that is obsessed with methodology. Research methods. As if the data will reveal its meaning with enough layers of rigorous methodology. I think that’s a trap. Chronic infection is one such leap. /1

There’s probably not a lot of data that will tell you that it may be the mammoth-sized elephant in the room in all medical science. It’s worth remembering key aspects of Einstein’s General Relativity received no confirming data until a century after he devised the theory. /2

Rheumatic fever for example had contested casual explanations, until antibiotics to clear strep also eliminated rheumatic fever. The human body is being shown more all the time to be in essence a microbial system, rather than a physico-chemical system, with some bugs added. /3

So many medical paradigms are mechanical, physico-chemical. That’s the conceptual foundation, rarely discussed. It’s actually quite bizarre how little actual biology informs many of our dominant medical theories. It’s like we’re working on a car in the shed. /4

Similarly the battle over Covid measures is largely a conceptual battle, between public health and medicine, with an enormously unhealthy dose of free market baloney hidden from view in many of the concepts. Public health and medicine have always slugged it out. /5

But the politics of our time, of the economy, is a huge fan of medicalising pandemics. Giving everybody a quick shot, and then back to work. Living with pandemic viruses, outrageously ridiculous nonsense. The greatest conceptual reinvention we need is ‘the public’ itself. /6

Mistaken for a majority of people in a society, the libertarian political idea, which replaces a public (all people and their interrelationships) with majorities and minorities, concepts derived from the electoral processes the same politics uses to achieve power. /7

The public is an administrative construct. It’s not ‘the people’, the fascists’ favourite concept, they love to evoke the people in their brutal schemes. The people doesn’t exist, it has no voice. It gets to vote, which is just numbers on a page. /8

Numbers which politicians then overlay any meaning they like on. I call it a voice-over, not a voice. The public is none of that, it’s a regulatory invention, a constant assessment of inter-relationships between all people, assessments of issues and their solutions. /9

It’s what the hated ‘bureaucrats’ do, bureaucrats invented and maintain the public. That’s why they’re called a ‘public service’. Not just because they serve the public, but because they create and maintain it. It’s not visible from polls or elections. /10

It needs reams of data and analysis, to tease out of our complex social relationships. Public health is not a quick jab and then living your best life. It’s a sophisticated state of constant analysis and intervention, towards an optimum state for all people. /11

All of that has been swept away with the economy and markets, the idea that all societies are just markets of individuals. And those who do badly are now ‘the vulnerable’, and just need a bit of a leg-up, until they ‘have a go’ like the rest of us. Utter bullshit. /12

But that’s what this pandemic is really about, these conceptual frameworks. No amount of data will fix it. Only by conceptually unravelling our deepest beliefs will we be free of it. /end